A comparison of heuristics for family and job scheduling in a flow-line manufacturing cell

This paper proposes new procedures for scheduling a flow-time manufacturing cell and compares the results obtained by using these new procedures to results obtained using procedures developed by Wemmerlöv and Vakharia, Skorin-Kapov and Vakharia, and Sridhar and Rajendran. The procedures are evaluated on the basis of the makespans generated by solutions for test problems. The results show that the new procedures can efficiently generate good makespans and that results obtained by using the tabu search procedure developed by Skorin-Kapov and Vakharia can be improved if a starting set of job and family sequences is generated by one of the new procedures.