An Enhanced Intelligent Water Drops Algorithm for Scheduling of an Agile Manufacturing System

This paper deals with an agile manufacturing system with two stages where the first stage is the machining stage including a single flexible machine while the second stage is assembly stage including parallel identical assembly machines. Products have an assembly structure where their parts should be processed at the first stage and then proceed to the assembly stage. The goal is to find the parts sequence which minimizes makespan. Since the studied problem is NP-hard, enhanced intelligent water drops (EIWD) algorithm as a new swarm-based nature inspired optimization algorithm is proposed. Also, artificial immune system (AIS) algorithm has been proposed to tackle the addressed problem. Computational results based on randomly generated instances show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.