Scheduling in an automated flow shop to minimize cost: Backward-meta scheduling method

Recently, computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) has become the most practical production system. Nevertheless, some problems appear in the stage of scheduling that are effected by the complexity of the system. Especially, CIM is classified to be an on-line system that has to decide the production schedule within a very short period. Nowadays, among the applied scheduling rules in CIMs, meta scheduling methods such as GA and SA have been widely used. In this paper, we have applied some meta scheduling methods to a model of CIM that is referred to as an automated flow shop, where backward scheduling should be used to realize a JIT's theory. For the objective function, we have intended to minimize the total cost calculated through the production schedule of orders. Scheduling methods have been constructed and tested in the scheduling model by conducting the simulation test. Finally, results of the simulation test have been compared to find the performance of the proposed method.