Loading and Routing Problems for Schedulability in a Flexible Manufacturing Environment

With the advances in concurrent engineering, schedulability has become an important design issue in machine loading and routing procedure. In this paper, four rules to improve schedulability of loading and routing are formulated as a mixed-integer programming model based on machine, routing and tool flexibilities. In this model, these rules are represented as an objective function or constraints. The impact of rules on the quality of schedules for the result of loading and routing is measured with makespan, throughput and average machine utilization.