A practical approach to scheduling a multistage, multiprocessor flow-shop problem

This paper describes a rubber manufacturing system and the numerous technological, operating and quality constraints governing its scheduling process. The complex system resembles a flow-shop problem where all jobs share the same general processing order on a progression of machines. The manufacturing system is defined in terms of production stages and parallel processing lines. One stage can process two or more jobs simultaneously. Jobs are often split on the last stage so that two or more parallel processing lines process the same job simultaneously. The scheduling for such a multistage, multiprocessor flow shop is dominated by the quality constraints. A pragmatic approach is provided in which a schedule is constructed through extensive iterations of analysis and simulation.