Modelling the Problem of Production Scheduling for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Companies are gradually moving towards reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) to achieve both changeable functionality of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) and scalable capacity of dedicated manufacturing lines (DML) to the extent possible. Despite this expected trend in manufacturing, there is a dearth of literature on scheduling for RMS; papers in the production scheduling literature still mainly focus on either DML or FMS. This paper tackles the problem of scheduling production operations in RMS. After explicitly defining different aspects of the problem, a mathematical model is developed to formally model the problem. Using the model and commercial software of operations research, the small instances of the problem are solved for optimality. To effectively solve large instances of the problem, different simulated annealing metaheuristics are developed. Using numerical experiments, the model and simulated annealing algorithms are evaluated for performance.