This thesis considers the problems of tool loading and scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). In general, the parts are the main portion of material flows in FMSs. However, in this FMS, tools are the main factor of material flows. This type of FMSs can be considered more advanced in the sense that the tool magazine capacity constraints are removed by an automatic tool transport robot. The parts are initially loaded on each machine and operations are performed by tools provided by the automatic flows. Hence, the part loading problem should be solved before considering the tool loading and scheduling. In this thesis we consider the following three problems; the part loading, tool loading, and tool scheduling problems. The overall objective function of these problems is to minimize the makespan.
The part loading is initially determined by an algorithm for the bin packing problems and then a heuristic based on tool usage frequency is applied for the tool loading, Finally, three heuristic algorithms, one of which is newly proposed, for the tool schedulling problem tested through a series of the tool scheduling problem. And some tests are performed by the computer simulation. The results show that the new scheduling algorithm gives a better makespan than the previous ones in certain situations.
