Branch and Bound Algorithm to Select the Best Process Plan in an Automated Manufacturing Environment

In flexible manufacturing environment, several process plans can be considered to manufacture a part. Thus, a process planner has to select the best process plan for a set of parts, among the existing competitive plans. This paper formulates process plan selection problem as a mixed integer programming model and develops a branch and bound algorithm to find a global optimum solution for this problem. The objective function of the proposed model is to minimize the sum of total cost associated with the processing times and number of process steps and the dissimilarity cost between the selected plans.