A heuristic approach for integrated nesting and scheduling in sheet metal processing

Abstract

In recent years, sustainable and agile manufacturing is aimed at in many manufacturing industries. Reducing the waste of raw materials and managing the production schedule are important factors for such manufacturing. Nesting is an activity designing a cutting layout while scheduling is one managing operational procedures. Noting such nesting and scheduling in sheet metal processing, we need to consider those simultaneously for increasing the entire efficiency. This is because there often occurs a trade-off between them. To resolve such problem, we previously proposed an integrated method of nesting and scheduling. In order to enhance the scheduling ability that was insufficient in our method, this study extends the idea through a heuristic approach. Actually, we apply a local search to update the initial schedule which is decided by EDD based dispatching rule and manage it in terms of the criteria referring to the bottleneck process. Computational experiment is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.