Inter-cell scheduling based on a transportation vehicle sharing strategy

In order to quickly respond to market demands and save investments on equipment, inter-cell manufacturing with flexible routes and candidate manufacturing cells is studied. An inter-cell scheduling model aiming at minimising total costs and makespan is proposed. Current transportation strategy (CTS) for inter-cell manufacturing might cause unloaded routes of vehicles, increase transportation costs and makespan. To reduce unloaded routes, a transportation vehicle sharing strategy (TVSS) in which exceptional parts could be transported by any vehicle in a manufacturing system and vehicles do not need to be returned to their original cells without load after one transportation is proposed. An improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm (ISFLA) is designed to solve the model. A case study and several random cases are used to verify the proposed TVSS. Results show that the proposed TVSS could reduce unloaded routes effectively and yield better solutions on both total costs and makespan than the CTS. [Received: 29 March 2021; Accepted: 16 September 2022]