Modeling of a scheduling problem for a flexible manufacturing system with dynamic machine-tool selection and operation allocation by an evolutionary algorithm

This paper considers scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) with dynamic machine-tool selection and operation allocation. Although the machine-tool selection and operation allocation problem of an FMS is known for its complexity, scheduling of these systems is more operative and more complex. In addition, due to the NP-hard nature of this problem, a modified evolutionary algorithm (EA) is proposed to solve the given problem. Its performance is tested on a number of randomly generated problems. Furthermore, the related results are compared with the results obtained by a branch-and-bound (B&B) method. It is found that the modified EA with the island model gives the good results in terms of the objective function values and CPU times.