Production Scheduling for a Flexible Manufacturing Cell

This study considers flowshop scheduling problem related to flexible maufacturing cell in which consists of two machining centers, robots for loading/unloading, and an automated guided vehicle(AGV) for material handling between two machining centers. Because no machinng center has buffer storage for work in process, a machining center can not release a finished job until the empty AGV is available at that machining center. While the AGV cannot tranfer an unfinished job to a machining center until the machining center empty. In this paper, an new heuristic algorithm is given to find the sequence that minimize their makespan.