Coordinated scheduling of intercell production and intercell transportation in the equipment manufacturing industry

Abstract

Intercell moves are caused by exceptional parts which need to be processed in multiple cells. Intercell cooperation disrupts the cellular manufacturing philosophy of creating independent cells, but is essential to lower the costs for enterprises. This article addresses an intercell scheduling problem considering limited transportation capability. To solve this problem, a two-stage ant colony optimization approach is proposed, in which pre-scheduling and re-scheduling are performed sequentially. To evaluate and optimize the interaction of production and transportation, a transportation benefit function is presented, according to which the scheduling solutions are adjusted. The computational results show that the transportation benefit function is more effective than other strategies, and the proposed approach has significant advantages over CPLEX in both the production dimension and the transportation dimension.

Keywords:

• manufacturing
• intercell
• transportation
• coordinated scheduling
• ant colony optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305215X.2016.1150470.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [71401014].