Integrated scheduling of machines and AGVs in FMS by using dispatching rules

Abstract

Recent advancement in meta-heuristics for simultaneous scheduling of machines and AGV studies have applied various techniques such as Differential evaluation (DE), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to solve the simultaneous scheduling problem. All of these technique requires an initial scheduler in order to initiate the scheduling process and the priority rule algorithms will typically be used. However, from the literature, none of these studies elaborate and justify their selection of a particular priority rule algorithms over another. Since the initial scheduler can significantly affect the entire scheduling process, it is important that the correct initial scheduler be selected. In this paper we quantitatively compared three initial scheduler algorithms to determine the best algorithm performance. We believe the performance comparison would enable users to utilize the best initial scheduler to fit their meta-heuristics simultaneous scheduling studies.