Heuristics for the FMS-loading and part-type-selection problems

In this article, the authors study the FMS-loading and part-type-selection problems, in which each part is processed by a series of operations. Two heuristic methods are presented for the objectives of balancing workloads and meeting due dates. These heuristics perform a specific evaluation of the objective function at each iteration. The goal of Heuristic ℝ1 is to achieve workload balance. The additional goal of Heuristic ℝ2 is to reduce the number of late part types. The loading and part-type selection must satisfy a tooling constraint. Computational results are encouraging and indicate significant improvement over the existing methods.