Abstract :

Authors: Najat Almasarwah, Gursel Suer   Publication date: 2017   Conference: Computers and Industrial Engineering Conference   Abstract: In many cellular manufacturing systems, cells have flowshop scheduling characteristics. Most flowshop scheduling methods appeared in the literature assume that products are processed in batch or mixed mode. However, it has been observed that processing products in mixed mode (Batch-Cyclic Scheduling) improves the production rates as long as setup times are negligible. In this study, three phases are proposed to solve this problem. The first phase determines the product families based on processing similarity coefficients between products. Then in the second phase a new dissimilarity coefficient among products is used to divide the product family into subfamilies. Even though products in the same family are similar, we are attempting to create subfamilies where products in a subfamily have different bottleneck machines and wide difference between processing times. The production rate improvement observed when running products in batch-mixed-mode was higher when bottleneck machines shifted and difference in processing times was higher. Finally, in the third phase, the products in each subfamily are scheduled in their corresponding cells using batch-cyclic and batch scheduling methods.