ABSTRACT
The production industries generally involve various processes such as design, manufacturing, marketing. And the manufacturing process consists of operations like, welding, milling etc. In reality there can be numerous of operations to be carried out on a raw material before it comes out as a final product. Many times other materials were added to or removed from the original material, some totally different in nature. Each of this operations consume different processing times. In addition to that, each of these operations need separate machines to perform each action. Hence, in the shop floor each machine is used for a particular job at a time. Once a job is done, the setup on the machine needs to be changed to do another job. There will be some time required to change the setup done for doing one job to another job. The setup times are invariably involved in all scheduling situations. However, they are added to processing times in many of the situations. Certainly, this procedure will reduce the complexity of the problem solved. On the other hand it will affect the quality of solutions obtained. Hence, there is need for explicit consideration setup time, which is addressed in the present study.
