SCHEDULING WITH ALTERNATIVE OPERATIONS

Considerable investment in the installation of an automated manufactur ing system requires scheduling approaches that highly utilize its reso urces. The incorporation of alternative operations into a scheduling s ystem increases the utilization rate of resources and reduces the make span of manufacturing products. In the paper, a heuristic algorithm is developed for a scheduling problem with and without alternative opera tions. The effect of alternative operations on the performance of sche dules generated are studied with five dispatching rules. The testing e ffort involves 240 scheduling problems obtained for randomly generated data. The computational results show that the most dissimilar resourc es (MDR) dispatching rule for the case with alternative operations per forms best among the dispatching rules tested. The quality of schedule s (makespan, utilization rate of resources) generated with any dispatc hing rule improves when alternative operations are used.