Auxiliary tool allocation in flexible manufacturing systems

This paper analyses a new approach to the machine loading problem arising in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). This approach allows the operations to be assigned to machines assuming that machines have access to all the tools required for their operations. This exploits the flexibility of the FMS completely. Next an allocation of tools to machines is determined which satisfies the tool requirements for each machine and minimizes the total number of tools. Thus this approach minimizes the unnecessary tool duplications in the system and maximizes the tool utilization. The problem is modeled as an integer linear program. We notice that the main problem has a block diagonal structure which is decomposable by relaxing a set of linking constraints. Each separated sub-problem represents a problem of allocation of a single type of tools. We develop a branch-and-bound based exact solution procedure and three heuristic procedures to solve the sub-problems. Our lower bounding approach uses Lagrangean relaxation. The solutions to the Lagrangean relaxation are further used to determine the branching sequences and to develop heuristic approaches. Since finding even a feasible solution to the main problem is NP-hard, we develop only enumerative procedures to solve the main problem. Finally, these solution procedures are tested on randomly generated test problems.