Heuristics based integrated design environment for planning and scheduling in FMS

A heuristic based design environment for process planning and scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) is presented. The proposed design environment consists of the structuring module, planning module, scheduling module, and simulation module. A group technology (GT) based heuristic method is proposed to obtain a feasible solution for the planning problem in consideration of the available machining time, limited capacity tool magazine, and workload balance. Some heuristics are also provided in the scheduling module to dynamically determine the sequence of jobs to be processed on each machine. An object oriented simulation environment is proposed to evaluate the decisions on the planning and scheduling problems