Improvement of material handling and resources utilization for a small manufacturer: An application of cellular manufacturing layout and genetic algorithm-based scheduling.

摘要

A Calgary-based manufacturer produces steel industrial shelters for gas plants. As demand has been increasing in the last few years, management wants to improve the productivity of the plant without significant capital investment.; The objective of this thesis is therefore two-fold. First, we re-designed a plant layout using cellular manufacturing principles to improve production flow and reduce material handling costs. In comparison with the original layout, the new layout provides a substantial improvement in the system performance and has since been implemented.; In the second phase, we developed a combined algorithm, which comprises of two parts, for scheduling jobs. The fist part constructs ten job sequences for ten work stations using three dispatching rules, Shortest Processing Time, Earliest Due Date and Minimum Setup. The second part applies a modified Simple Genetic Algorithm to generate one optimal job schedule for all ten work stations in the plant.