Metaheuristic approach to sequence product families in reconfigurable manufacturing systems*

Resumen

This research aims at the development of a heuristic approach to select the best set of product families and their production scheduling in Recon?gurable Manufacturing Systems when exact methodologies cannot offer a solution, due to the complexity of the instances may requires an excessive computing time. For tackling the problem, a speci?c and quick heuristic variant of the Nearest Neighbour method has been developed and implemented. Solutions to the problem are signi?cantly improved when they are used as part of a tabu search algorithm, within a reasonable computing time. These results have been improved applying a diversi?cation rule to the tabu search procedure. Keywords: tabu search, scheduling, recon?gurable manufacturing.