Design of a scheduling system for flexible manufacturing cells

The objective of this paper is to describe an effective scheduling system for flexible manufacturing cells (FMC). Based on FMC characteristics, cell scheduling can be categorized for a dynamic, modified flow shop working in a real-time environment. A heuristic static cell scheduling methodology for minimizing mean flowtime is first proposed. This is then modified to allow dynamic cell scheduling to reflect the real-world situation of continuous job introduction to the cell. Computational results show that the proposed algorithms yield optimal or near optimal job sequences in a very short period of time, thus satisfying a real-time need of rapid computation.