Design of a scheduling system for a flexible manufacturing cell

From a literature review, it is apparent that there is a trend in industry away from grandiose schemes such as the Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) to much more focused, smaller, manageable levels of factory automation. At present, the most feasible approach to automate, computerize, and integrate the job shop process is through the Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC), which requires lower investment, less risk, and also satisfies the benefits of FMS. Based on the FMC characteristics, cell scheduling can be categorized as an open dynamic modified flow shop, working in a real-time system. However, limited effort has been given to such cell scheduling, and most research has been restricted to static scheduling.;In this research, the cell control system and requirements for cell scheduling were first studied. Based on these, a heuristic static cell scheduling methodology has been proposed with the purpose of minimizing mean flowtime. Then, the static cell scheduling algorithm was modified to allow dynamic cell scheduling to reflect the real world situation. Finally, time constraints were also considered to fit cell process-oriented manufacturing systems.;All the proposed algorithms have been evaluated by running simulation programs. Computational results show that these proposed algorithms yield optimal or near optimal job sequences in a very short time, thus satisfying real-time scheduling needs. Also, the scheduling performances are better than other existing scheduling algorithms in terms of scheduling performance measures.