Integrated scheduling of material handling and manufacturing activities in flexible manufacturing system

This paper deals with the simultaneous scheduling of incoming jobs, machines, and vehicle dispatching in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) having a single device automated guided vehicle (AGV). The objective is to find an order in which the jobs enter into the FMS, reducing the waiting times due to the blocking and non-availability of resources needed as well as the deadheading time resulting in overall reduction in make-span of products. In this work a meta-heuristic algorithm, scatter search based iterative procedure, which accommodates the combinatorial nature of the problem, is proposed to approximately solve the integrated scheduling problem. The procedure is evaluated through different benchmark problems and the outcome of the study is encouraging and paves ample scope for further research in this area.