Scheduling in a manufacturing shop with sequence-dependent setups

In this paper, the problem of scheduling multiple jobs in a flexible manufacturing cell with multiple machine stations is addressed. Due to the large capital investments that usually characterize flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), an area of control of great interest to system users is that of maximizing the system performance through the minimization of machine idle and setup times. The magnitude of total time spent on machine setups and idle times is influenced by the availability of jobs, job mix, similarities of jobs and job scheduling procedure used. Similar jobs on the same machine require less setup times. Similarly, the use of an adequate scheduling method also reduces total idle and setup times. Such reduction improves the flow times of jobs. In this paper, a heuristic algoritm for scheduling jobs with sequence dependent setup times in a FMS is presented. The measure of performance for evaluating schedule adequacy is the production makespan.