Assembly scheduling of complex devices with work force optimization

Order lateness, labor limitation and overtime allowance are considered to generate a near-optimized feasible schedule for assembly system of complex devices which allows various routings. Hybrid methodology combined with forward process and back process is proposed to obtain an initial feasible solution using dynamic min-slack rule. Iterative order reallocation mechanism is given to find premature orders in forward process and eliminate abnormal orders in back process. An algorithm is also proposed to keep labor balance by workers moving and overtime manipulation. Some objective functions are presented to evaluate our proposed method and results of experiment show that both order lateness and labor assignment can be improved effectively.