SCHEDULING A FLOW-LINE MANUFACTURING CELL - A TABU SEARCH APPROACH

The performance of two heuristic procedures for the scheduling of a fl ow-line manufacturing cell was compared. We propose a procedure based on a combinatorial search technique known as tabu search. The new proc edure is compared with a heuristic based on simulated annealing which was proposed in earlier research. The scheduling problem addressed her e differs from the traditional flow-shop scheduling problem in the sen se that we are interested in sequencing part families (i.e. groups of jobs which share a similar setup) as well as individual jobs within ea ch family. The results reveal that the tabu search heuristic outperfor ms the simulated annealing heuristic by generating 'better solutions' in less computation time.