Bi-criteria process routing based on COMSOAL approach

This paper investigates the application of the computer method COMSOAL (Computer Method of Sequencing Operations for Assembly Lines) to the process routing (PR) problem with multiple objectives. In any computer aided process planning (CAPP) system, one of the most critical activities for manufacturing a part could be to generate the sequence that optimizes production time, production cost, machine utilization or with several of these criteria. The COMSOAL has been adopted to find the optimum sequence of operations that optimizes two major conflicting criteria; production cost and production quality. The COMSOAL is here slightly modified to simultaneously generate and evaluate a set of possible solutions (called a population) instead of processing a solution stepwise in each iteration. The significant features of the COMSOAL include: no parameters settings needed, and a guarantee of feasible solutions. Experimental results show that COMSOAL is a simple but powerful method to quickly generate multiple feasible solutions which are as good as the ones obtained from several other well-known process routing algorithms.