Scheduling hybrid flowshops in printed circuit board assembly lines

We treat a three-stage hybrid flowshop for the production of printed circuit boards (PCB), suggested to us by real-life production situation. The problem is to determine a schedule that minimizes the makespan for a given demand profile over a finite planning horizon. We propose a global procedure that utilizes genetic algorithms and three subproblems. The performance of the procedure is evaluated via experimentation over thousands of problem realizations that are randomly generated. The experimental results show the efficiency of the global procedure and provide qualitative answers to the allocation of machines to the various stages.