Solving Distributed Flexible Manufacturing Systems Scheduling Problems Subject to Maintenance: Memetic Algorithms Approach

In general, distributed flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) scheduling problems are more complicated than the classical FMS scheduling, because it has to focus on two different issues: first, allocation of jobs to suitable factories and second, determination of the corresponding production scheduling in each factory. On the other hand in distributed FMS scheduling, maintenance usually is not considered however in the production level, every machine requires maintenance and this matter directly affects the machine´s availability, production rate, consumption rate, etc. Consequently considering maintenance problem increases system reliability. In this paper we have proposed a memetic algorithm for distributed FMS scheduling which considers maintenance problem. The objective of this algorithm is to create a time-cost trade off which is being brought up for the first time. The experimental results show that the optimization performance of this proposed algorithm is 8.85% better than SMGA and also 10.99% better than GADG algorithm.