A CBFSA approach to resolve the distributed manufacturing process planning problem in a supply chain environment

In this competitive world cost and lead time reduction are of prime concern for manufacturing firms. To achieve this objective manufacturing entities are adopting several management philosophies such as Total Quality Management (TQM), just-in-time (JIT), and theory of constraints (TOC). The present paper addresses the advanced computer-aided process planning (ACAPP) problem in a distributed manufacturing supply chain environment and aims at cost and lead times reduction under several technological constraints. To deal with the complexity of the problem the constraint based fast simulated annealing (CBFSA) algorithm has been explored in this article. Extensive computations have been performed over the well-known benchmarks of advanced planning problems and the results obtained prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior approaches.