Bidirectional Load Planning Procedure for Job-Shops with Availability Time-Windows for Specific Machines

Abstract

This paper presents a bidirectional load planning procedure for job-shops with availability time-windows for specific machines. This heuristic procedure uses priority rules and reverse planning directions to progressively construct two schedules: one for machines with availability constraints (the bottlenecks) and upstream, and other for bottlenecks downstream. Bottlenecks schedule is driving the schedule for all other non-bottleneck machines. Makespan reduction for aggregate schedule is finally performed if possible, by left shifting scheduled operations to their earliest start times.