Tool requirements planning in a flexible manufacturing system with an automatic tool transporter

We consider a tool requirements planning problem in a flexible manufacturing system with an automatic tool transporter. The problem considered here is that of determining the number of tool copies of each tool type with the objective of minimizing total tardiness of orders with distinct due dates for a given budget for tool purchase. For the problem, several heuristic algorithms are developed using greedy search methods and simulation. In the heuristic algorithms, the numbers of tool copies for certain tool types are increased until they cannot be increased any more because of the budget limit. Simulation results are used to determine search directions or to select tool types of which the numbers of copies are to be increased. Computational experiments are performed on randomly generated test problems and results show that a good tool requirements plan can be obtained with the heuristic algorithms in a reasonable amount of computation time.