A. Agnetis, PLANNING THE ROUTING MIX IN FASS TO MINIMIZE TOTAL TRANSPORTATION TIME, International journal of flexible manufacturing systems, 8(2), 1996, pp. 131-157
The routing mix problem in flexible assembly systems is considered. Th
e problem consists of assigning the operations for each part to the ma
chines, with the two objectives of balancing the machine workloads and
minimizing the burden of the transportation system. These two objecti
ves are sometimes conflicting, since the latter tends to support assig
ning operations to the same machine(s) as much as possible, and this m
ay be bad for workload balancing. A linear programming problem is pres
ented that, given a constraint on the workload of each machine, finds
one solution that minimizes the overall time spent moving the parts fr
om one machine to another. Since such a linear program may have an exp
onential number of variables, an efficient column generation technique
to solve the problem is devised. The efficiency of the method is vali
dated by experiments on a large number of random problems.