A simulated annealing approach to integrated production scheduling

This paper describes an approach to manufacturing planning that seeks to integrate both process planning and scheduling. We show that separating these two related tasks, as is the common practice, can impose constraints that substantially reduce the quality of the final schedule. These constraints arise from premature decisions regarding operation sequence and allocation of manufacturing resources. Having formulated an integrated process planning and scheduling problem, we describe a solution technique based on simulated annealing. We compare this approach with others reported in the literature, considering both their generality and performance. In particular, we perform a detailed empirical comparison between simulated annealing and the popular technique of dispatching rules. Our results, achieved with two distinct sets of example problems, show that simulated annealing can produce solutions of significantly higher quality than those achieved through a published dispatching rule approach.