Some solution methodologies for loading problems in a flexible manufacturing system

The loading problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is viewed as selecting a subset of jobs from the job pool and allocating jobs among machines. A two-stage branch and backtrack procedure is developed with the objective of maximizing the assigned workload. Heuristic procedures are also developed with a bicriterion objective of minimizing the workload imbalance and maximizing the throughput for critical resources such as the number of tool slots on machines and the number of working hours in a scheduling period. The case of machine-dependent processing times is also dealt with. An illustrative numerical example accompanies each procedure.