MINIMIZATION OF EXPECTED MAKESPAN IN FLOWSHOP USING CBM

Manufacturing units have to meet concurrently several requirements such as: quick reaction to market demand, high product quality, justifiable manufacturing costs and well-timed deliveries, etc. Generally, the shop floor level personnel treat maintenance and processing times in segregation for the purpose of scheduling, joint consideration of equipment maintenance and scheduling on the performance of the manufacturing system is taken into consideration in this paper. In practice machines may be temporarily not available for many reasons, such as unforeseen scheduled preventive and breakdown maintenance, operator non availability, spare parts damage, etc. An effort is made to schedule a flowshop problem with time deterioration under “Condition Based Maintenance” (CBM) constraints to minimize the expected makespan. The randomness of the problem is tackled by simulation. Genetic and tabu search algorithms applied to tackle such hard problem. Experimental studies conducted and the results are promising in nature.