A survey on occurrence of critical machines in a manufacturing environment

Abstract

The modern manufacturing environment is generally expressed in terms of flowshop, where all the machines are considered equally, despite the availability of critical machines. Here, a survey was made on the manufacturing environment to identify the critical machines in it. The critical machine is identified based on processing time, operation, maintenance requirement, automation, life, breakdown, buffer or delay time, rental cost, and so on. Mostly, the scheduling was done to reduce the makespan and total completion time. These objectives are indirectly achieved by effective utilization of critical machine. The need to develop heuristics becomes vital to achieve these objectives. Though many heuristics are successful, it does not concentrate on critical machine but the role of critical machines in a flowshop becomes essential. This Study was done to analyze the maximum possibilities and effective utilization of critical machines in a flowshop. Many researchers focused on the critical machines at its first stage, but very few reports are available on its second stage and further stages. The tedious task with the critical machines can be made easier by new solution methods. This article focused on the possibility of critical machine, position of critical machine and the need of a hybrid flowshop in the modern manufacturing environment for the effective management of the critical machines.