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Product competitiveness, shorter product life cycle and increased product varieties are posing mere challenges to the manufacturing industries. The situation poses a need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of capacity planning and resource optimization while still maintaining their flexibilities. Machine loading - one of the important components of capacity planning is known for its complexity that encompasses various types of flexibilities pertaining to part selection, machine and operation assignment along with constraints. The main objective of the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is to balance the productivity of the production floor as well as maintaining its flexibility. From the literature, optimization-based methods tend to become impractical when the problem size increases while heuristic-based methods are more robust in their practicality although they may dependent on constraints of individual …