Heuristic Algorithms for Fowline Cellular Manufacturing System Scheduling

Scheduling in cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is treated as group scheduling problem, which assumes all jobs in a family to be processed in the same cell. However, there exists a circumstances called inter-cell move in typical CMS environments, and this fact limits the applicability of group scheduling approaches. In order to solve this kind of problem, this paper considers the scheduling of CMS with inter-cell moves for makespan minimization. Based on the analysis of completion times of machines and jobs, a new mathematical model is proposed. A composite heuristic named N-ILS, two hybrid meta-heuristics named HGA and HHS, are respectively proposed to solve this problem. The performance of these algorithms are evaluated on 810 test problems. The experimental results show that N-ILS is the best in efficiency, HGA performs better than HHS and N-ILS in effectiveness.