Integrated Scheduling of Ladder layout design in Flexible Manufacturing System using Non-Traditional optimization techniques

Abstract

The Ladder layout design (LLD) problem generally crop ups when a manufacturing cluster intended to enlarge their making capacity and/or decrease the transportation cost or material flow through a predefined sequence of machines for manufacturing a product. The problem is known to be Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP) hard, which is usually solved by metaheuristics. In this paper, multi-objective optimization is considered related to FMS scheduling which acts as a constraint in configuring the ladder layout in optimum manner by various algorithms such as Metaheuristics like PSM, SA etc. The various Ladder layout problems are tested for performance of objective function with respect to computational time and number of iterations involved in SA and PSM. A necessary code is generated in C++ and the code is run by the IDE tool. The results of the different optimization algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA), Particle swarm method (PSM) are compared. Finally, it is observed that most of solutions obtained from SA are marginally better than PSM except in some exceptional cases but the computational time taken by SA were almost same as PSM.