Article ID: | iaor20071767 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 57 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 163 |
End Page Number: | 176 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2006 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Gupta J.N.D., Schaller J.E. |
Keywords: | programming: branch and bound, heuristics |
This paper considers the problem of scheduling part families and jobs within each part family in a flowline manufacturing cell with independent family setup times where parts (jobs) in each family are processed together. The objective is to minimize total flow time. A branch-and-bound algorithm capable of solving moderate sized problems is developed. Several heuristic algorithms are proposed and empirically evaluated as to their effectiveness and efficiency in finding optimal permutation schedules. These results show that several heuristic algorithms generate solutions that are better than those generated by an existing genetic algorithm.