Scheduling a flow-line manufacturing cell: A tabu search approach

The performance of two heuristic procedures for the scheduling of a flow-line manufacturing cell was compared. We propose a procedure based on a combinatorial search technique known as tabu search. The new procedure is compared with a heuristic based on simulated annealing which was proposed in earlier research. The scheduling problem addressed here differs from the traditional flow-shop scheduling problem in the sense that we are interested in sequencing part families (i.e. groups of jobs which share a similar setup) as well as individual jobs within each family. The results reveal that the tabu search heuristic outperforms the simulated annealing heuristic by generating 'better solutions' in less computation time.