A simulated annealing approach to scheduling a manufacturing cell

This article proposes a new heuristic based on simulated annealing that schedules part families, as well as jobs within each part family, in a flow-line manufacturing cell. The new scheduling approach is compared to a branch and bound algorithm as well as two other family-based scheduling heuristics for different cell configurations. The results reveal that all the heuristics provide comparable solutions to the optimal procedure for small problems. However, when the problem size increases, the simulated annealing heuristic outperforms the other procedures not only in solution quality but also by requiring substantially less computation time.