Using simulated annealing to schedule a flowshop manufacturing cell with sequence-dependent family setup times

Abstract

This paper proposes a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic to minimise makespan in a flowshop manufacturing cell with sequence-dependent family setup times. To escape from local minima, Cauchy function – rather than the Boltzmann function – is used during the annealing process. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic is compared against the existing heuristics on a benchmark problem dataset used in earlier studies. These computational results show that the proposed simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic is highly effective as compared to the state-of-the-art meta-heuristics for this problem on the same benchmark instances.

Keywords:

• scheduling
• flowshop manufacturing cell
• sequence-dependent family setups
• simulated annealing
• meta-heuristics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments. This paper was supported in part by the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan, under the contract NSC 96-2221-E-211-009.