Producing customised products in a short time at low cost is one of the goals of agile manufacturing. To achieve this goal an assembly-driven differentiation strategy has been proposed in the agile manufacturing literature. In this paper, we address a manufacturing system that applies the assembly-driven differentiation strategy. The system consists of machining and assembly stages, where there is a single machine at the machining stage and multiple identical assembly stations at the assembly stage. An ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithm is developed for solving the scheduling problem of determining the sequence of parts to be produced in the system so as to minimise the maximum completion time (or makespan). The ACO algorithm uses a new dispatching rule as the heuristic desirability and variable neighbourhood search as the local search to make it more efficient and effective. To evaluate the performance of heuristic algorithms, a branch-and-bound procedure is proposed for deriving the optimal solution to the problem. Computational results show that the proposed ACO algorithm is superior to the existing algorithm, not only improving the performance but also decreasing the computation time.
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