Integrated Scheduling of Operations and Material Handling Systems using Evolutionary Algorithms in a Flexible Manufacturing System

In today's produce to market environment, manufacturing sector has capabilities to meet the challenging demands. Flexible manufacturing system is one remedy for facing these challenging situations, which will have much flexibility; Scheduling plays a vital role for any organization in meeting the customers demand and producing the product in the right time. As far as scheduling in flexible manufacturing is concerned travelling times are as important as processing times. Hence scheduling of material handling system cannot be neglected in FMS. So both operations as well as material handling system is considered with make span minimization as the objective criteria. Evolutionary Algorithms which mimics the natural genetics are considered to be an effective tool for many optimization problems. So Genetic Algorithm, one of the members of Evolutionary Algorithms is considered for integrated scheduling of operations and material handling system in a Flexible Manufacturing system environment.