Operation sequencing in nonlinear process planning is the problem of simultaneous selecting and sequencing operations required to produce a part while satisfying the precedence relations among operations. The objective is to minimize the sum of operation processing costs and machine, setup and tool change costs. In this paper, four simulated annealing and two tabu search algorithms are suggested after decomposing the problem into two subproblems: operation selection and operation sequencing. Application of the search heuristics is illustrated using an example part. Also, to show the performances of the search heuristics, computational experiments were done on randomly generated test problems and the results are reported. In particular, some of the suggested heuristics outperform an existing algorithm.
nonlinear process planning, operation sequencing, decomposition, local search heuristics.
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