ABSTRACT
Traditionally process planning, scheduling, and due-date assignment functions are not all integrated. During the last few decades, there have been numerous studies on integrated process planning and scheduling, and on scheduling with due-date assignment. Unfortunately, these studies do not consider the weights of the jobs while determining due dates. In addition to that, these three functions are integrated only in a few pieces of research. Since scheduling function alone belongs to NP-Hard class problems, integrated problems are even harder to solve. Developments in technology, hardware, software, and algorithms provide easy solutions to complex, or previously unsolvable, problems. In order to obtain a higher global benefit, it is better to integrate as many functions as possible together by using technology, software, and new meta-heuristic algorithms. Integration of process planning weighted scheduling and weighted due-date assignment by using popular meta-heuristics provides substantial improvements in performance functions. Higher integration of these three important functions is better than intermediate integration levels of these three functions where process planning and scheduling are integrated, or scheduling and due-date assignments are handled concurrently.
