Approaches to machine load balancing in flexible manufacturing systems

The load balancing problem for a flexible manufacturing system concerns the allocation of operations to machines and of tools to magazines with limited capacity, while seeking to balance the workload on all machines. Previous attempts to tackle this problem have used integer programming and a specialized branch and bound procedure has been developed. A modified integer programming approach is proposed here. The problem has certain features which can be used advantagneously for an approximate solution technique. The approximation technique is described and computational results presented. Extensions to the problem of pooling machines are also considered.