Heuristics for operator scheduling in Group Technology cells

Abstract

We devised heuristic approaches for operator scheduling in manned Grouped Technology (GT) cells. The heuristic approach consists of (1) Cycle Switching Rules (CSR) to deal with production environments covering a longer decision horizon, and (2) Dynamic Scheduling Rules (DSR) to deal with environments covering a shorter decision horizon. They differ in information requirements and decision horizons. In simulation experiments, we show that there is a predictable trade-off between the quality of the resulting schedule and the information content of heuristics used.