Crane scheduling with time windows in circuit board production lines

This paper studies a crane scheduling problem with time windows in a flow-shop type production system. Feasibility of a state of the system is first discussed. Then, based on the insight derived from the mathematical programming formulation of feasibility, an optimization-based heuristic algorithm for real-time scheduling of the system is developed. Computer simulation on randomly generated problems shows that this algorithm has an excellent performance in maximizing throughput without defective jobs.