Selecting Equipment for Flexible Flow Shops

Abstract

Equipment selection is one of the challenges faced during manufacturing system design. Selecting the proper equipment is important to satisfying budget constraints, achieving required throughput, and reducing manufacturing cycle time and inventory. This paper formulates an equipment selection problem and presents two search algorithms used to find high-quality solutions. Queueing system models are used to calculate the manufacturing cycle time. The paper discusses the results of experiments conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithms across a range of problem characteristics.