A New Heuristic Procedure for Production Planning and Scheduling of Modern Manufacturing Systems

It has been recognized that machine loading and product-mix decision are important problems in the area of production planning and scheduling for manufacturing systems. A product-mix and machine loading decision poses a problem of determining the jobs or parts to be produced within limited amounts of production resources such as facilities capacity, production times, etc. Group technology, in some cases called part-family manufacturing, is a technique and philosophy to increase production efficiency by grouping a variety of parts having similarities of shape, dimension and/or process route [2]. The Production Planning and Scheduling problem considering group technology has been in- vestigated by several authors [1,3]. The purpose of this paper is to present a new heuristic Algorithm based on a feasible enumeration method, developed to solve the machine loading and product-mix decision problem for manufacturing systems based on group technology. It provides an efficient tool for machine load and product-mix analysis to optimally select parts to be manufactured in a limited amount of time available in a given production facility, by applying the group technology concept. A computational algorithm is developed, a sample numerical problem included, and computational results presented. It is shown that the algorithm herein proposed is very efficient from the-com- putational view point. The heuristics imbeded in the feasible enumeration procedure is represented by a pority rule which has been found to be independent of problem data and general for the class of problem analysed.