A tabu search approach for cell scheduling problem with makespan criterion

Scheduling problem in a cellular manufacturing system is treated as the group scheduling problem, assuming that intercellular moves can be eliminated by duplicating machines. However, in a typical CMS, duplicating bottleneck machines may be costly and infeasible. This fact limits the applicability of group scheduling. Scheduling problem in the presence of bottleneck machines is termed as cell scheduling. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed for the attempted cell scheduling problem and a nested application of tabu search approach is investigated in this paper to solve the problem heuristically. The effectiveness of the proposed nested tabu search (NTS) algorithm is evaluated on 16 problems selected from the literature. Comparison of the results of NTS with SVS-algorithm reveals the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.