Design and optimisation of loop layout problems flexible manufacturing system using sheep flock heredity algorithm

Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a programmable manufacturing system, and the performance of the system an important factor determined by the layout of the machines. The main aim is to find out an optimal design of a unidirectional loop layout network. Evaluation of this layout is usually performed by estimating the traffic congestion, which is defined as the number of times a part traverses the loop before its processing is completed. In this paper, sheep flock heredity algorithm (SFHA) is proposed for solving the unidirectional loop layout problem with the consideration of both min_sum and min_max objectives. In SFHA, the pairwise mutation process is replaced by single-point mutation process, which guarantees the feasibility of the solutions in the local search domain. Chromosomal crossover is replaced by robust-replace heuristic to enhance the global search. Metaheuristic procedure is tested on small-sized bench mark problems, and two large-sized hypothetical problems are randomly generated. The computational results show that the SFHA algorithm is efficient in solving the small-sized bench mark problems with min_max approach and produces good quality solutions comparatively. The min_sum approach outperforms the min_max approach for two large-sized hypothetical problems.