Abstract
This research examines the influences that scheduling schemes and the degree of routeing flexibility have on random, job shop flexible manufacturing systems within a static environment. The first factor in the experiment includes three scheduling schemes. Two of these schemes are off-line schemes which schedule many operations prior to actual production. The first of the off-line schemes establishes an overall optimal solution, and the second off-line scheme decomposes the problem into a loading subproblem and a resulting scheduling subproblem and finds optimal solutions to both subproblems. The third scheme uses control policies and dispatching rules to establish a schedule in a real-time mode. The number of alternative machine options (i.e., the degree of routeing flexibility) is a second factor in the experiment and includes eleven levels. In addition, the effects of interaction between scheduling and routeing flexibility on performance are explored.