In recent years, efficient and agile manufacturing is aimed at in many manufacturing industries. In sheet metal processing, reducing the waste of raw materials and managing the suitable production schedule are the important factors for such manufacturing. Nesting is executed to determine the optimal layout for raw material. And scheduling is executed to determine the suitable schedule. Generally, nesting and scheduling are executed separately because their optimization objectives are different. However there occurs a certain trade-off between nesting and scheduling. Therefore, those problems should be considered simultaneously in order to increase the efficiency of entire manufacturing activity. Under such understanding, in this study, we propose an nesting method with considering schedule. In this method, we apply Genetic Algorithm to solve the nesting problem. We propose a new fitness function which considers both reduction of waste material and minimizing total tardiness. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through some computational experiments.

In recent years, sustainable and agile manufacturing is aimed at in many manufacturing industries. Reducing the waste of raw materials and managing the production schedule are important factors for such manufacturing. Nesting is an activity designing a cutting layout while scheduling is one managing operational procedures. Noting such nesting and scheduling in sheet metal processing, we need to consider those simultaneously for increasing the entire efficiency. This is because there often occurs a trade-off between them. To resolve such problem, we previously proposed an integrated method of nesting and scheduling. In order to enhance the scheduling ability that was insufficient in our method, this study extends the idea through a heuristic approach. Actually, we apply a local search to update the initial schedule which is decided by EDD based dispatching rule and manage it in terms of the criteria referring to the bottleneck process. Computational experiment is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.