Scheduling methods for a hybrid flowshop with dynamic order arrival

This paper considers a scheduling problem for a hybrid flowshop with dynamic order arrival. A hybrid flowshop is an extended form of a flowshop, which has serial stages like a flowshop but there can be more than one machine at each stage. In this paper, we propose a new method for the problem of scheduling with the objective of minimizing mean tardiness of orders which arrive at the shop dynamically. The proposed method is based on the list scheduling approach, however we use a more sophisticated method to prioritize lots unlike dispatching rule-based methods. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a simulation model of a hybrid flowshop-type production system is constructed. We implement well-known dispatching rules and the proposed methods in the simulation model. From a series of simulation tests, we show that the proposed methods perform better than other methods.