Article ID: | iaor1999162 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 91 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 124 |
End Page Number: | 143 |
Publication Date: | May 1996 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Kim Yeong-Dae, Park Moon-Won, Lim Hyeong-Gyu |
Keywords: | flowshop, tabu search, electronics industry |
We consider a scheduling problem in a factory producing printed circuit boards (PCBs). The PCB assembly process in this factory can be regarded as a flowshop which has two special characteristics: jobs have sequence dependent setup times and each job consists of a lot (batch) of identical PCBs. Because of the latter characteristic, it is possible to start a job on a following machine before the job is entirely completed on a previous machine, that is, there is time-lag between machines. In this paper, we propose several heuristics, including tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA) methods, for this generalized flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing mean tardiness. We compare suggested heuristics after series of tests to find appropriate values for parameters needed for the two search algorithms, TS and SA. Results of computational tests on randomly generated test problems are reported.