An integrated neural network based system and methodology for group technology scheduling

Abstract

Group Technology (GT) concept has widely been adopted in many manufacturing companies. In these companies, the required resources including the machines, tooling and material handling equipment dedicated for each part family are grouped into a GT cell. Such an arrangement will enable the manufacturing companies to simplify their scheduling processes. To-date many scheduling heuristics have been developed to improve the effectiveness of scheduling in the GT cells. These heuristics, however, have not been effective for scheduling parallel machines with major and minor setup times. Such machines can perform a variety of operations on a large set of part families. The determination of major and minor setup times for each machine is dependent on the similarities of part families to be scheduled on that machine. The objective is to minimize flow time and tardiness by reducing the total setup times.