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Scheduling jobs and tools is a significant problem for manufacturing systems. Inefficient job scheduling and tool loading planning may result in the underutilization of capital-intensive machines and a high machine idle time. Tools are transferred by a tool transporter (TT) between machines. Therefore, efficient scheduling of jobs, TT, and the tools with alternate machines enables a manufacturing system to increase machines’ utilization and decrease their idle times. This paper addresses machines, TT, and tools concurrent scheduling with alternate machines and only one copy of every tool variety is made available where the tools are costly, in a multi-machine flexible manufacturing system, taking into account tool transfer times for makespan (MS) minimization. The tools are placed in a central tool magazine, which shares and serves them to many machines to cut down the price of duplicating the tools in each machine. The problem is to assign machines from alternate machines, tools, and corresponding TT trips, including the deadheading trip and loaded trip, to job operations for MS minimization. This paper uses a nonlinear mixed-integer programming framework to present the problem, and a flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is employed to solve it. The results show that FPA outperforms the Jaya algorithm, and the usage of alternate machines for the operations reduces the MS. Reduction in MS indicates an improvement in utilization of resources.

Artificial intelligence is a tool used by human intelligence and technology to improve various fields’ performance. In the simplest sense, AI is a branch of intelligence involved in constructing intelligent machines that can be used for work that usually requires human understanding. Human resources management plays a vital role in the company’s management and generally encompasses people and their behaviour. HR policies are a set of guidelines for the organisation’s management of its staff. Today, HR managers must examine the skills and talents required by employee artificial intelligence in different departments. The problem identified here is that human limitations, such as biases, preconceptions, and time restrictions, can prevent an HRM process’s effectiveness. This is a problem because it can lead an organisation to lose its job and monetary value candidates. The chapter discusses artificial intelligence’s influence on job/work and HRM where we are focusing mostly on small manufacturing units.

Are there laws of information exchange? And how do the principles of thermodynamics connect with the communication of information?

We consider first the concept of information and examine the various alternatives for its definition. The reductionist approach has been to regard information as arising out of matter and energy. In such an approach, coded information systems such as DNA are regarded as accidental in terms of the origin of life, and it is argued that these then led to the evolution of all life forms as a process of increasing complexity by natural selection operating on mutations on these first forms of life. However scientists in the discipline of thermodynamics have long been aware that organisational systems are inherently systems with low local entropy, and have argued that the only way to have consistency with an evolutionary model of the universe and common descent of all life forms is to posit a flow of low entropy into the earth's environment and in this second approach they suggest that islands of low entropy form organisational structures found in living systems.

A third alternative proposes that information is in fact non-material and that the coded information systems (such as, but not restricted to the coding of DNA in all living systems) is not defined at all by the biochemistry or physics of the molecules used to store the data. Rather than matter and energy defining the information sitting on the polymers of life, this approach posits that the reverse is in fact the case. Information has its definition outside the matter and energy on which it sits, and furthermore constrains it to operate in a highly non-equilibrium thermodynamic environment. This proposal resolves the thermodynamic issues and invokes the correct paradigm for understanding the vital area of thermodynamic/organisational interactions, which despite the efforts from alternative paradigms has not given a satisfactory explanation of the way information in systems operates.

Starting from the paradigm of information being defined by non-material arrangement and coding, one can then postulate the idea of laws of information exchange which have some parallels with the laws of thermodynamics which undergird such an approach. These issues are explored tentatively in this paper, and lay the groundwork for further investigative study.