Article ID: | iaor20021173 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 31 |
Issue: | 8 |
Start Page Number: | 733 |
End Page Number: | 738 |
Publication Date: | Aug 1999 |
Journal: | IIE Transactions |
Authors: | Hodgson Thom J., Culbreth C.T., Huang J.C., Yaghubian A.R., Joines J.A. |
Keywords: | manufacturing industries |
In this paper, a dry kiln scheduling problem from the furniture manufacturing industry is considered. Factory-specified due dates for orders, kiln availability, kiln capacity, and travel time from the kilns to the factories are all incorporated in a model which is formulated as an integer linear program. The objective of the formulation is to minimize the maximum tardiness of orders arriving at the plants by solving a special case of scheduling n independent jobs on m non-identical parallel machines. Because of the computational complexity, and the fact that standard integer programming packages appear to perform very poorly on the problem, a heuristic approach is developed. Computational experience is provided which indicates that the heuristic gives very high quality solutions to problems in near real-time.