Production control of a flexible manufacturing system in a job shop environment

This paper provides an application oriented analysis of local search procedures for Operation Scheduling and Shop Floor Management of a major German manufacturer of cigarette machines. The heuristics applied are the Threshold- and Simulated Annealing-Algorithm considering Job Shop as well as embedded FMS production features. In this context a new neighbourhood search technique is developed, which is based on a small set of local neighbourhoods and is flexible with respect to the performance measurements of production control. By this approach the scheduling, loading and workload allocation problems of a production facility consisting of an embedded FMS and a conventional Job Shop can be solved simultaneously.