Performance Study of Flexible Manufacturing System Using Scatter Search Algorithm and Dispatching Rules

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is an automated manufacturing system which has job shop flexibility and flow shop efficiency. One of the major concerns in Flexible Manufacturing System is scheduling of jobs to the machines with the objective of increasing average machine utilization. The Scatter Search (SS) algorithm is proposed to solve scheduling problems and compared with dispatching rules like Shortest Processing Time (SPT), Longest Processing Time (LPT), Least Operation Remaining (LOR) and Most Wor k Remaining (MWR). The results are compared for two case studies (6 machines X 6 jobs and 9 machines X 2 jobs) and it is observed that the Scatter Search algorithm provides better result when compared with dispatching rules with respect to average machine utilization