Optimization of a New Tool Switching Problem in Flexible Manufacturing Systems with a Tool Life by a Genetic Algorithm

摘要

This paper considers a tool switching problem (ToSP) in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). Indeed, a new version of the ToSP that may be faced in practice is proposed. In this paper, a tool life is considered for each tool and a new formulation of the ToSP is presented, however, because of the complexity of such an NP-hard problem, the exact method can't be used to solve large-sized problems. Therefore, a well-known meta-heuristic method, genetic algorithm (GA), is proposed to solve the problem. Furthermore, the computational results obtained by the proposed GA and the B&B methods are compared by performing on several non-large dimension instances. Finally, it is shown that the GA results are promising.