Scheduling Cellular Manufacturing Systems Using ACO and GA

In this paper, cellular manufacturing scheduling problems are studied. The objective is to minimize makespan (Cmax) considering part family in the manufacturing cell flow line where the setup times are sequence dependent. Minimizing Cmax will result in the increment of output rate and the speed of manufacturing systems which is the main goal of such systems. This problem is solved using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) operators, and local search technique. To show the validity of proposed approach, it is compared with a tailor-made heuristic algorithm, called SVS. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method is quite fast and efficient.