Scheduling with tool changes to minimize total completion time: a study of heuristics and their performance
Author
Aktürk, M. S.
Ghosh, J. B.
Güneş, E. D.
Date
2003Source Title
Naval Research Logistics
Print ISSN
0894-069X
Electronic ISSN
1520-6750
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Volume
50
Issue
1
Pages
15 - 30
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
134
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130
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Abstract
The machine scheduling literature does not consider the issue of tool change. The
parallel literature on tool management addresses this issue but assumes that the change is due
only to part mix. In practice, however, a tool change is caused most frequently by tool wear. That
is why we consider here the problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single CNC machine where
the cutting tool is subject to wear; our objective is to minimize the total completion time. We first
describe the problem and discuss its peculiarities. After briefly reviewing available theoretical
results, we then go on to provide a mixed 0–1 linear programming model for the exact solution
of the problem; this is useful in solving problem instances with up to 20 jobs and has been used
in our computational study. As our main contribution, we next propose a number of heuristic
algorithms based on simple dispatch rules and generic search. We then discuss the results of a
computational study where the performance of the various heuristics is tested; we note that the
well-known SPT rule remains good when the tool change time is small but deteriorates as this
time increases and further that the proposed algorithms promise significant improvement over the
SPT rule.
Keywords
AlgorithmsComputer control systems
Computer simulation
Heuristic methods
Linear programming
Numerical control systems
Performance
Process engineering
Scheduling
Tools
Tool allocation
Factory automation