Production and transport scheduling in flexible job shop manufacturing systems

• Published in: Journal of global optimization Vol. 79; no. 2; pp. 463 - 502
• Main Authors: Homayouni, Seyed Mahdi, Fontes, Dalila B. M. M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.02.2021; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Computer Science; Integer programming; Job shop scheduling; Job shops; Linear programming; Mathematics; Mathematics and Statistics; Mixed integer; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Optimization; Production scheduling; Real Functions; Vehicles; Late acceptance hill climbing; Transport; Mixed integer linear programming model; Flexible job shop
• ISSN: 0925-5001; 1573-2916
• DOI: 10.1007/s10898-021-00992-6

This paper addresses an extension of the flexible job shop scheduling problem by considering that jobs need to be moved around the shop-floor by a set of vehicles. Thus, this problem involves assigning each production operation to one of the alternative machines, finding the sequence of operations for each machine, assigning each transport task to one of the vehicles, and finding the sequence of transport tasks for each vehicle, simultaneously. Transportation is usually neglected in the literature and when considered, an unlimited number of vehicles is, typically, assumed. Here, we propose the first mixed integer linear programming model for this problem and show its efficiency at solving small-sized instances to optimality. In addition, and due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, we propose a local search based heuristic that the computational experiments show to be effective, efficient, and robust.