ISE Seminar Series - Thesis Defense

"Efficient Job Scheduling for a Cellular Manufacturing Environment "

Joshua Dennie
Master of Science Candidate
Industrial and Systems Engineering

Date: Friday, September 15th, 2006
Time: 10:00am
Location: Room 09-2159 (Kate Gleason Engineering Building)

An important aspect of any manufacturing environment is efficient job scheduling. With an increase in manufacturing facilities focused on producing goods with a lean manufacturing approach, the need arises to schedule jobs optimally into cells at an exact time. With each job and each cell having its own distinguishing parameters, the task of scheduling jobs quickly becomes very difficult and time-consuming. In an attempt to solve the problem within an acceptable amount of time, a mathematical model has been developed to represent a standard cellularized manufacturing job scheduling problem. The model incorporates important parameters of the jobs and the cells and constraints that the problem solution must meet. Several heuristics have been developed to be applied to the model and examined for problems of different sizes and difficulty levels, culminating in an ultimate heuristic that can be applied to most size problems. The ultimate heuristic uses a greedy multi-phase iterative process to first assign jobs to particular cells and then to schedule the jobs within the assigned cells. The heuristic relaxes several variables and constraints along the way, while taking into account the flexibility of the different jobs and the current load of the different cells. Testing and analysis proves that when the heuristic is applied to different size job scheduling problems, the solving time is significantly decreased, while still resulting in a near optimal solution.

Thesis Committee:
Dr. Moises Sudit (Chair), Industrial and Systems Engineering
Dr. Michael Kuhl, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Questions?
Contact Dr. Michael Kuhl at 475-2134 or mekeie@rit.edu