Solving flexible manufacturing system distributed scheduling problem subject to maintenance using harmony search algorithm

Flexible manufacturing system is one of the industrial branches that highly competitive and rapidly expand. Globalization of the industrial system has encouraged the development of distributed manufacturing, including flexible manufacturing system. As such, the complexity of the problem faced in this new environment promotes current researcher to develop various approaches in optimizing the production scheduling. Approaches such as petri net, ant colony, genetic algorithm, intelligent agents, particle swarm optimization, and tabu search are used to apprehend optimization issues. In reality, maintenance is one of the core parts which is important to the manufacturing scheduling as it will affect greatly toward the manufacturing scheduling when the machine breakdown happen. Unfortunately, most approaches disregard the preventive maintenance in the production scheduling problem. In this paper, a harmony search algorithm is introduced to address the problem which includes maintenance. The problem description is successfully represented and the algorithm performance is studied with several parameter tunings.