Date Available

12-7-2011

Year of Publication

2006

Document Type

Thesis

College

Engineering

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Fazleena Badurdeen

Abstract

Minicells are small manufacturing cells dedicated to an option family and organized in a multi-stage configuration for mass customization manufacturing. Product variants, depending on the customization requirements of each customer, are routed through the minicells as necessary. For successful mass customization, customized products must be manufactured at low cost and with short turn around time. Effective scheduling of jobs to be processed in minicells is essential to quickly deliver customized products. In this research, a genetic algorithm based approach is developed to schedule jobs in a minicell configuration by considering it as a multi-stage flow shop. A new crossover strategy is used in the genetic algorithm to obtain a minimum flow time schedule.

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