The effect of material flow and workload on the performance of machine location heuristics

Depending on the problem structure and routing strategies a machine location problem plays an important role in controlling the material flow of work-in-process in discrete product manufacturing environment. In this paper we investigate the effect of material flow and workload on the performance of heuristics for solving an important design problem for job routing and material flow in a manufacturing system. In this research we first develop a model for workload or traffic intensity between machines in a shop floor and then identify different structures of the problems, especially the data. This measure is then used to evaluate the effect of workload on efficiency of the heuristics to solve machine location problems. Some concluding remarks are made on the effect of the workload or the traffic intensity of materials within the machine cell on the performance of some known heuristics. Conclusions are also made on the performance measures such as makespan, transporter utilization and machine utilization, depending on the problem and data structures.