Abstract
In this paper, we consider a production ordering problem for an assembly process with several constraints. One constraint is that the capacity of the buffers at thee input and output sides of the process is limited. The other constraint is that the cycle time of the worker is constant.
For obtaining a good suboptimal feasible solution, the genetic algorithm is applied to this problem. A procedure for carrying out the operations of reproduction, crossover and mutation is shown.
The effectiveness of the algorithm is compared from the viewpoints of accuracy and computation time among other methods, such as the heuristic method and the simulated annealing method. It is observed from numerical results that the genetic algorithm takes much computation time, but finds a better solution than other methods. Further, the genetic algorithm is found to be effective in spite of narrow feasible region.
