Job routing and operations scheduling: A network-based virtual cell formation approach

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2001

Abstract

Virtual cellular manufacturing inherits the benefits of traditional cellular manufacturing and maintains the responsiveness to the changing market and routing flexibility of a job shop by integrating machine-grouping, shop layout design andintercellular flow handling. The primary goal of virtual cell formation is to minimize the throughput time of a given job.This paper proposes a method for virtual cell formation by adopting the double-sweep algorithm for the ^-shortest pathproblem, and a heuristic is devised to schedule the virtual cells for the multiple job orders. Results generated l^om thismethod include not only the optimal candidates of the virtual cell with the shortest throughput time with sub-optimalalternative route(s) and throughput time(s) as the alternative candidates in case some resources are restricted or are notavailable. The procedure of virtual cell creation and scheduling is illustrated explicitly with examples. Since most of thescheduling problems are NP-hard and virtual cell scheduling is even more complex due to the bottleneck machines thatare demanded by jobs at other cells. For multiplicity of possible virtual cell candidates, in addition to the precedence andresource constraints, heuristic solutions are found to be reasonable. © 2001 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Journal of the Operational Research Society

First Page

673

Last Page

681

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