An evaluation of group scheduling heuristics in a flow-line manufacturing cell

When a company adopts cellular manufacturing and creates a cell, one operational problem that must be addressed is how to schedule parts within the cell. Many studies have investigated scheduling rules in a cellular manufacturing environment. However, there has been little consensus on the best scheduling rule to use. To address this lack of consensus, this study evaluated the best scheduling rules from most of these studies in a flow-line cell. The impact of two environmental factors, setup to runtime ratio and number of part families, was also investigated. Out of the five best scheduling rules found, three of these had not been investigated in previous group scheduling studies. The scheduling rule that most often perfromed best was selecting the part family with the most waiting jobs and sequencing these jobs in shortest processing time order, a relatively simple rule. The more complex rules generally showed poorer performance.