Batching in production planning for flexible manufacturing systems

Generally, production planning in flexible manufacturing systems is hierarchically grouped into two subproblems: batching and loading. These two subproblems can be solved either sequentially or simultaneously to generate a feasible production plan. This paper focuses on the batching problem which partitions the given production order of part types into batches that can be processed with the limited production resources such as the capacity of the tool magazines, pallets, fixtures and available machine time. A 0-1 integer program is formulated to address the batching problem and a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed for solving it. A systematic computational test is conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the simulated annealing algorithm can provide high-quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time for practical size problems.