Modeling realistic hybrid flexible flowshop scheduling problems

This paper aims to contribute to the recent research efforts to bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of scheduling by modelizing a realistic manufacturing environment and analyzing the effect of the inclusion of several characteristics in the problem formulation. There are several constraints and characteristics that affect the scheduling operations at companies. While these constraints are many times tackled in the literature, they are seldom considered together inside the same problem formulation. We propose a formulation along with a mixed integer modelization and some heuristics for the problem of scheduling n jobs on m stages where at each stage we have a known number of unrelated machines. The jobs might skip stages and, therefore, we have what we call a hybrid flexible flowshop problem.