Scheduling production tasks in a two-stage flexible manufacturing system

The paper is concerned with construction of a heuristic algorithm for an existing two-machine FMS. The system contains two dedicated machines with an automatic transport system served by one robot. There are three storage places: unlimited input and output buffers and a limited transitional one. The jobs are grouped into batches of identical parts. The parts are produced in a flow shop production environment. The parameters like release dates and set-up times for batches are taken into account. Futhermore, some of the parts need an additional operation processed by cooperatives between their first and second operation of the job. The heuristic algorithm has been constructed for the makespan criterion. Appropriate computational experiments validated the model and the algorithm proposed.