This paper compares and evaluates the performance of five different conventional job selection dis-patching rules for scheduling of multi-load automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) serving for material handling operations in variable sized flexible manufacturing system (FMS) layout. Four sizes of FMS layout are considered for the performance evaluation of the five types of conventional job se-lection dispatching rules. The FMS layouts under consideration are served by the two multi-load AGVs. The multi-load AGVs cruises under machine initiated the nearest vehicle (NV) dispatching rule for the material handling activities at all work centers (WCs) for all four sizes of FMS layout. Four sizes of FMS layout produce five different types of parts and consist of three, six, nine and twelve work centers and loading-unloading centers, respectively. In the simulation test, it is found that the identical destination first (IDF) job selection rule having selection criterion based on the destination similarity of two picked up jobs outperforms all other job selection dispatching rules for an overall production rate of the FMS (parts/hr) in all four FMS layouts.

Sustainability in project operations such as financial, social and environmental sustainability is one of the most prominent issues of the present times to address. The increased focus on sus-tainable business operations has changed the viewpoint of researchers and corporate community towards the project management. Today sustainability in business operations along with sustain-ability of natural and environmental resources are of paramount significance which has further caused a huge impact on conception, planning, scheduling and execution of the project manage-ment activities. In this paper, a literature review between 1987 and 2018 on different issues af-fecting the sustainability in project management is carried out. The present study also identifies and discusses the future possibilities to apply computational procedures in order to estimate and optimize the sustainability issues in the management of projects, for example the computational evolutionary algorithms can be applied to formulate the multi-objective decision-making problem after considering critical factors of sustainability in the projects and then yielding optimized solu-tions for the formulated problem to achieve sustainability in the projects. A new integrated framework with the inclusion of feedback function for assessment of each decision and actions taken towards the sustainability of the projects is also identified and presented.