Integrated Process Planning, Scheduling, Due-Date Assignment and Delivery Using Simulated Annealing and Evolutionary Strategies

Process planning, scheduling, and due date assignment functions are the three fundamental manufacturing functions. Traditionally, these functions were examined independently in production systems. The integrated communication of these functions is one of the most efficient ways to ensure high customer satisfaction, nonetheless, in the technological and competitive climate of today. Although these functions have been integrated in academic research over the past few decades, in practice, they are still generally performed sequentially and independently. Although limited research exists that integrates the three functions, this study introduces delivery as a fourth function. The objectives of this study are to make a significant contribution to the literature by demonstrating the integrated nature of four functions in manufacturing systems, with a view to increasing efficiency compared to traditional solutions. The study also seeks to investigate the impact of incorporating the delivery function. Customers are not viewed as being equal, as is the case with many of the other integrated studies that can be found in the literature; rather, each client is given special consideration. Each of the four job shops is unique and has a different number and location of customers. The study solves the complex problem by utilizing simulated annealing and evolutionary strategies algorithms. Both method-based and job shop-based comparisons are made, and the results show which methods perform better in each job shop. The results demonstrate that the integrated system offers an improvement of approximately 50% compared to independent systems. Furthermore, the study found that, across all four job shops, the evolutionary strategies (ES) outperformed simulated annealing (SA) in terms of results.