Scheduling of products with common and product-dependent components manufactured at a single facility

This paper analyses a scheduling problem concerned with the production of components at a single manufacturing facility where the manufactured components are subsequently assembled into a finite number of end products. Each product is composed of a common component and a product-dependent component, and completion time of a product is determined by the completion time of the last of two components. All the components are manufactured in a batch process at the single facility and, during the batch process, the manufactured components are individually moved to the next (assembly) station; switching from production of product-dependent components to common components only incurs a set-up cost. The solution properties are characterized subject to the mean flow time measure, based upon which an efficient branch-and-bound solution algorithm is exploited.