In: Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing , Vol. 12 No. 5, pages 421-432. October 2001.
Abstract: Optimisation is a key issue in the design of large manufacturing systems. An adequate modelling formalism to express the intricate interleaving of competition and cooperation relationships is needed first. Moreover, robust and efficient optimisation techniques are necessary. This paper presents an integrated tool for the automated optimisation of DEDS, with application to manufacturing systems. After a very quick overview of optimisation problems in Manufacturing Systems, it presents the integration of two existing tools for the modelling and evaluation with Petri nets and a general-purpose optimisation package based on Simulated Annealing. The consideration of a cache and a two phase technique for optimisation allows to speed-up the optimisation by a factor of about 35. During the first preoptimisation phase, a rough approximation of the optimal parameter set is computed based on performance bounds. Two application examples show the benefits of the proposed technique.
Keywords: Petri Nets; Optimization; Meta-heuristic; Manufacturing Systems; Simulated Annealing.