Minimizing Completion Time of Processing and Assembly Operations Using Simulated Annealing

This paper aims to study the problem of minimizing the completion time of a product in a cellular manufacturing system with multiple processing cells and a single assembly cell. Some types of parallel machines are involved in the processing cells, and parts are allowed to move among cells. A new model is developed for simultaneous processing and assembly. To find the optimal solution of this model, a structure of the solution is designed and a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) is developed. Numerical experiments show that our proposed model takes significantly less time than a model in which all parts are processed and then assembled.