Biswanath Chakraborty , Santanu Das
Abstract
A project is made up of a group of interrelated activities within some constraints. The objective of a project is, therefore, to stick to the delivery time by resorting to an optimized production schedule. Traditional Operations Research (OR) techniques have been found effective for the optimization of production schedules of new technologies. However, this technology is not that effective for existing robust technologies such as large projects that include high-rise building, manufacturing of heavy electrical and electronic products, etc. Traditional OR technique like PERT/CPM deals with the balancing of production schedules of new technologies, and these techniques are appropriate for totally unknown project where balancing of all new activities of production schedule is possible. For an existing technology, rebalancing of the already balanced schedule of activities is much required for attaining optimization. The present paper proposes a new metaheuristic model which is based on the integration of Group Technology (GT), CPM and Line of Balance (LOB) technologies. This new technology is named as GCL for optimization of the production schedule through serialized utilization of resources of a large project. This model is applied to a case of an industry to obtain good line balance efficiency.
Keywords- CPM, LOB, Balancing of Activities, Metaheuristic Technique, Production scheduling, GT.