Multipart setup planning through integration of process planning and scheduling

The importance of integration of process planning and scheduling is evident in today’s competitive manufacturing system. Meanwhile, the setup planning plays an important role for integration, because setup planning is done after process planning, just before scheduling. In this article, a new approach for setup planning for multiparts is introduced to realize integration of process planning and scheduling with more details of manufacturing constraints for setup planning. For this purpose, the necessary and unnecessary (preferred) constraints are defined for setup formation and a new matrix is presented to distinguish these and to specify the precedence of operations. The simulated annealing is used in setup planning for N parts simultaneously based on multi-technical and scheduling objectives. The proposed system is based on the machining operation instead of features, to select machine tools more accurately. Another factor for the selection of machine tools is tolerances that are considered in this article and greatly affected the machining cost. An illustrative example is presented to show the effectiveness of the operation-based system and the second example is presented to demonstrate the influence of multipart setup planning versus single-part setup planning. The results show that considering multiparts improves the scheduling objectives such as makespan.