Scheduling a Bottleneck Facility for Two Production Lines

Abstract

This paper deals with a scheduling problem at a bottleneck common facility lorn subsequent production lines, each of which is dedicated to produce a family of products. The common facility represents the bottleneck, since its capacity is less than the sum of the capacities of then production lines. The components supplied by the bottleneck lor the n lines are not exactly the same, and hence a non-productivechange-over (or setup) time for the bottleneck is incurred when jobs switch between families. As such, it is desirable to make as few change-overs as possible to save the expensive setup time. However, if the bottleneck continues processingjobs for a given line, not only will the inventory at the line build up but also other lines will become idle. Thus, a scheduling scheme must be developed for finding a schedule that keeps all the production lines busy with few change-overs for the bottleneck. This objective can be appropriately measured by minimizationofthe total production time. For thecaseoln = 2,a solutionprocedureisdevelopedin this paper to find the optimal schedule.