A Molecular Computational Approach to Solving a Work Centre Sequence-Oriented Manufacturing Problem of Classical Job Shop Scheduling
Ikno Kim and Junzo Watada
Classical job shop scheduling includes an intractable manufacturing scheduling problem. The problem is how to minimise the maximum manufacturing completion time in high variety and low volume requirements. Further, we have to consider work centre sequences for how all the given jobs are sequenced by work centre orders, meaning that it is an NP-hard problem. A number of different types of methods and algorithms have been proposed for solving this issue. In this article, we focused on molecular computational methods and biological techniques to propose a new algorithm. Our algorithm can be used to search all the feasible manufacturing schedules, and isolate the schedule with the truly minimised maximum manufacturing completion time.
Keywords: Classical job shop scheduling, feasible manufacturing scheduling, molecular computational algorithm, molecular encoding method, work centre sequence-oriented manufacturing problem.