Scheduling a flowline manufacturing cell with sequence dependent family setup times

This paper considers the problem of scheduling part families and jobs within each part family in a flowline manufacturing cell where the setup times for each family are sequence dependent and it is desired to minimize the makespan while processing parts (jobs) in each family together. Lower bounds on the optimal makespan value and efficient heuristic algorithms for finding permutation schedules are proposed and empirically evaluated as to their effectiveness in finding optimal permutation schedules.