Agile Manufacturing Systems are evolving to meet the challenges of an increasing time based competition in high variety environments. This paper is motivated by a tudy of an Indian Enterprise in the Telecom Sector where a conventional low variety company is seeking avenues for re-organizing itself towards agility. We propose a novel concept of Dynamic Re-configuration with Integrated Scheduling (DRISJ in manufacturing systems, to achieve greater agility. It is suggested that the inherent flexibility in many multi-skilled workforce based assembly systems allows dynamic re-configuration opponunities. However without effective decisions on when to re-configure, how much to re-configure and what order to schedule on a re-configured system, it is not possible to exploit this opponunity. We propose the use of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based technique to obtain reasonably good schedules for such a dynamic re-configurable production system. The technique has been demonstrated using a simple model of a production system comprising multiple production lines, each capable of being re-configured into two or three independent producticm lines or re-combined into single lines, dynamically. The results indicate that the performance of the GA based technique is superior to the standard scheduling rules of "Shortest Processing Time" (SPT) and "Earliest Due Date" (EDD). The results also indicate that as the variability of demand on production system increases, GA based technique comes to better solutions for the integrated scheduling of dynamic re-configuration systems. It is proposed that DRIS approach can offer immense opponunities for the agile enterprise capabilities.
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