Process planning, scheduling and due-date assignment are three important manufacturing functions in our life. They all try to get local optima and there can be enormous loss in overall performance value if they are handled separately. That is why they should be handled concurrently. Although integrated process planning and scheduling with due date assignment problem is not addressed much in the literature, there are numerous works on integrated process planning and scheduling and many works on scheduling with due date assignment. Most of the works in the literature assign common due date for the jobs waiting and due dates are determined without taking into account of the weights of the customers. Here process planning function is integrated with weighted shortest processing times (WSPT) scheduling and weighted slack (WSLK) due date assignment. In this study unique due dates are given to each customer and important customers gets closer due dates. Integration of these three functions is tested for different levels of integration with genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies, hybrid genetic algorithms, hybrid evolutionary strategies and random search techniques. Best combinations are found as full integration with genetic search and hybrid genetic search. Integration of these three functions provided substantial improvements in global performance.
Architecture of an Integrated Process Planning and Tool Management System
