Setting a common due date in a constrained flowshop: A variable neighbourhood search approach

Abstract

In this paper we study a due date setting problem in a flowshop layout. The problem consists of scheduling a set of jobs arriving to the system together with jobs already present (denoted as old jobs), in order to set a common due date for the new jobs. Since the old jobs have a common due date that must not be violated, our problem is a rescheduling problem with the objective of minimising the makespan of the new jobs (thus obtaining the tightest possible due date for the new jobs) and a constraint since the maximum tardiness of the old jobs must be equal to zero.This approach leads to an interesting scheduling problem in which two different objectives are considered, each one for a subset of the jobs that must be scheduled.To the best of our knowledge, this type of problems have been scarcely considered in the literature, and only for very specific purposes. Since our problem is clearly NP-hard, a new heuristic based on Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) has been designed. The computational results show that our proposed heuristic outperforms two existing heuristic methods for similar problems in the literature. * This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in

New meta-heuristic for dynamic scheduling in permutation flowshop with new order arrival

“…RS and RT are two strategies which attach new orders to the end of the existing schedule. It has been confirmed that rescheduling the remaining jobs of the old order can provide a higher quality schedule [13,16,24]. However, no reactive methods can provide high-quality solutions with order mixing, therefore missing the opportunity of optimized schedule [25].…”

“…An assignment model is built for generating the baseline schedule and an improved genetic algorithm is developed for rescheduling of new orders in single-machine layout [34]. A refreshing variable neighborhood search (RVNS) approach is presented for job rescheduling to set common due dates for newly arrived orders in permutation flowshops [13]. In summary, the predictive-reactive method is the most popular one and it can provide high-quality schedules as order mixing can be achieved in job rescheduling.…”

“…It is NPhard in the strong sense especially when the due date of the old order is loose as it can be reduced to the PFSP by including all jobs from new orders [13]. In this paper, a new meta-heuristic is derived from the framework of the iterated greedy (IG) algorithm [21] under which a new enhanced destruction and construction method and a novel repair method are proposed.…”

“…Many studies [5,11] focus on the static environment which simplifies the problem constraint. However, more attention should be paid to dynamic aspects that frequently occurred in reality such as new order arrival [12,13], machine breakdown [14], and rush order [15]. It is typical in today's mass customization that new orders frequently arrive into factories.…”

Single machine interfering jobs problem with flowtime objective

“…Multi-agent scheduling problems model many realistic situations in productive environments. In a recent review on the topic, Perez-Gonzalez and cite a number of real applications in di erent domains, such as supply chain scheduling (Fan, 2010), rescheduling (Unal et al, 1997;Perez-Gonzalez and Framinan, 2010;Hall and Potts, 2004;Mu and Gu, 2010), telecommunications (Peha and Tobagi, * This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Springer in the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10845-015-1141-6 (Khelifati and Bouzid-Sitayeb, 2011;Wan et al, 2010;Kellerer and Strusevich, 2010).…”