Harmony search algorithm for flexible manufacturing system (FMS) machine loading problem

Product competitiveness, shorter product life cycle and increased product varieties are posing mere challenges to the manufacturing industries. The situation poses a need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of capacity planning and resource optimization while still maintaining their flexibilities. Machine loading - one of the important components of capacity planning is known for its complexity that encompasses various types of flexibilities pertaining to part selection, machine and operation assignment along with constraints. The main objective of the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is to balance the productivity of the production floor as well as maintaining its flexibility. From the literature, optimization-based methods tend to become impractical when the problem size increases while heuristic-based methods are more robust in their practicality although they may dependent on constraints of individual problems. We adopt a Harmony Search algorithm (HS) to solve this problem that aims on mapping the feasible solution vectors to the domain problem. The objectives are to minimize the system unbalance as well as increase throughput while satisfying the technological constraints such as machine time availability and tool slots. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on 10 sample problems available in FMS literature and compared with existing solution methods.