Scheduling Distributed Flexible Manufacturing Systems Using Multi-Objective Gravity Search Algorithm

The use of intelligent techniques and heuristic methods in the manufacturing field has been growing in the last decade due to the fact that mostly manufacturing optimization and scheduling problems are NP hard. The objective of this paper is to find a near-pare to scheduling planning for distributed flexible manufacturing system maximizing the system efficiency. This makes distributed scheduling problems more complicated than that of classical production ones. In our implementation we proposed a new multi objective gravity search algorithm to tackle this problem and our experimental results demonstrates that this approach is very effective for handling such scheduling or these complex systems.