JOBS AND TOOL SEQUENCING IN AN AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

A practical approach is presented for determining the sequence of jobs and tools in the magazine that would be required to process the jobs in an automated manufacturing environment. Each job has to be complete d before a given due date. The magazine has a limited capacity necessi tating setups which increase the lead times. Processing jobs also requ ires an appropriate fixture. Setting up a fixture also contributes to the setup times. A heuristic procedure is developed which determines t he above sequences while minimizing the total setup and processing tim es. The performance of the heuristic is checked against optimal soluti ons for small-size problems while bounds are obtained (based on statis tical lower bounding procedures) on the optimal solution for large-siz e problems. Computational results are provided for 155 test problems.