Reactive Scheduling Addressing Unexpected Disturbance in Cellular Manufacturing Systems

Most production environments face random, unexpected events such as machine failure, uncertain processing times, thearrival of new jobs, and cancellation of jobs. For the reduction of the undesirable side effects of an unexpected disruption, the initial schedule needs to be reformed partially or entirely. In this paper, a mathematical model is presented to address the integrated cell formation and cellular rescheduling problems in a cellular manufacturing system. As a reactive model, the model is developed to handle the arrival of a new job as a disturbance to the system. Based on the principle of resistance to change, the reactive model seeks a new solution with the minimum difference from the initial solution. This is realized through a simultaneous minimization of the total completion time and the number of displaced machines. For the investigation of the performance of the proposed model, some numerical examples are solved using the GAMS software. The results demonstrate the ability of the reactive model to obtain solutions resistant to unexpected changes.