Fabrication scheduling of products with common and unique components at a single facility

This paper considers a single facility scheduling problem for the fabrication of components supporting the subsequent assembly into products. Each product consists of two types of components, one is common to all products and the other is unique to itself. The unique components are processed individually and the common components are processed in batches, and a distinct setup is incurred for the production of a batch of common components. Under the so-called “batch availability” environment, we propose an efficient dynamic programming (DP) procedure for the optimal sequencing and batching schedule with minimum total completion times of products in the situation that each product is said to be complete if both common and unique components of the product are finished. Computational results show that the proposed DB procedure is more efficient than the previous work which has considered the same problem as this paper.