Dispatching scheduling of machines and vehicles in a flexible manufacturing system

The paper presents a heuristic approach for material flow control in a flexible machining system, where several different part types are manufactured. The system is composed of various machine types and a set of automated guided vehicles that permit each part to move between any pair of machines. The problem objective is to simultaneously schedule machines and vehicles so as to meet production requirements for selected part types in a minimum time. A two-level loading and scheduling approach is proposed with a single-pass scheduling heuristic based on a family of complex dispatching rules. Computational examples are included to illustrate the scheduling procedure.