Capacity allocation problem in flexible manufacturing systems: branch and bound based approaches

Abstract

This study considers an operation assignment and capacity allocation problem that arises in flexible manufacturing systems. The machines have limited time and tool magazine capacities and the available tools are limited. Our objective is to maximise total weight of assigned operations. We develop a branch and bound algorithm that finds the optimal solutions and a beam search algorithm that finds high quality solutions in polynomial time.

Keywords:

• beam search
• branch and bound
• capacity allocation
• flexible manufacturing systems
• tool assignment