Optimization of FMS Scheduling Using Non-Traditional Techniques

The importance of good scheduling strategies in production environments in today's competitive world market cannot be over-stressed. The need to respond to the market demands quickly and to run production units efficiently gives rise to a complex scheduling system. FMS scheduling involves allocation of batches to the machines so as to reduce the idle time of machines. Each machine processes at most one operation at a time and once an operation initiates processing on a given machine is said to be completed without interruption. The operations of a given batch are to be processed in the given order.