Integration of procurement and production scheduling in flexible flow-line assembly

Flexible flow-line manufacturing is being adopted by the manufacturers to produce an increased number of variations or models of an end product in order to meet customers' preferences and demand. This paper addresses a sequence dependent flexible flow-line assembly, which is commonly witnessed in the manufacturing of automobile, computer, home-appliances, etc. A model that integrates procurement and production scheduling is developed with the objective of minimising Integrated Total Cost (ITC), which includes assembly, switchover, material, inventory and shortage costs. A new sequencing heuristic algorithm for the above model is proposed by modifying the single-period flow-shop sequencing heuristic. The performance of proposed sequencing heuristic algorithm in the flexible flow-line assembly involving multi periods is analysed using the base sequences generated with four popular single-period sequencing heuristic algorithms.