A software program has been developed to ease the process of scheduling and
sequencing number of jobs to certain number of machines for job shop
manufacturing in sheet metal fabrication. The program is designed based on the
present operation at Technology Park Malaysia (TPM) - Production Engineering
using available priority dispatching rules and multiple performance measures.
For n by m job shop scheduling problems, where n is the number of jobs and m is
the number machines, there are (n!)m possible schedules. In a typical job shop,
hundreds of scheduling decisions must be made daily. Scheduling process, which is
to organise, maintain, update and reschedule the job, is very tedious work and time
consuming. For five jobs passing through one machine, there are 120 time charts just
to show all possible sequence patterns. To plot the charts manually is not. a practical
solution and ridiculous. Identifying the performance measures to be used in selecting the schedule is important. The schedule should reflect managerially acceptable
performance measures. A logical strategy is thus to pursue methods that can
consistently generate good schedules with quantifiable quality in a computationally
efficient manner
