Job shop planning and scheduling for manufacturers with manual operations

Job shop scheduling systems are widely employed to optimise the efficiency of machine utilisation in the manufacturing industry, by searching the most cost-effective permutation of job operations based on the cost of each operation on each compatible machine and the relations between job operations. Such systems are paralysed when the cost of operations are not predictable led by the involvement of complex manual operations. This paper proposes a new genetic algorithm-based job shop scheduling system by integrating a fuzzy learning and inference subsystem in an effort to address this limitation. In particular, the fuzzy subsystem adaptively estimates the completion time and thus cost of each manual task under different conditions based on a knowledge base that is initialised by domain experts and then constantly updated based on its built-in learning ability and adaptability. The manufacturer of Point of Sale and Point of Purchase products has been utilised in this paper as an example case for both theoretical discussion and experimental study. The experimental results demonstrate the promising of the proposed system in improving the efficiency of manual manufacturing operations.