New insertion and postoptimization procedures for the traveling salesman problem
Operations Research
A comparison of setup strategies for printed circuit board assembly
Computers and Industrial Engineering - Cellular manufacturing systems: design, analysis and implementation
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
A tabu search based algorithm for minimizing the number of tool switches on a flexible machine
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A Memetic Algorithm for the Tool Switching Problem
HM '08 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics
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The problem of minimizing the total number of tool switches for a numerically controlled flexible machine is considered. A set of parts is to be processed with the machine. Each part needs a set of tools which should reside in the magazine of the machine at the moment of processing. Because of the limited capacity of the magazine, tools must be switched and the objective is to minimize the amount of this work. We propose an algorithm which tries to avoid sticking to a local minimum by repeated searches from different initial starting points which are created by repeated construction of super parts from parts with similar tools. The proposed algorithm and a number of efficient heuristics presented in the literature are empirically tested by both random test problems and real production data. The new algorithm performs well when considering the tradeoff between solution quality and running time.