Scheduling with high variety of customized compound products

Domestic appliance is an instance of manufacturing various products upon customer demand with frequent changes of production. Although the technological process for each individual product is relatively simple, the variety of products, mixed orders, frequent machines changeovers, machines with unusual service policy, lack or limited storage, etc., generates quite nontrivial planning, batching and scheduling problems and, furthermore, of large size. In this paper, specific real process of production of refrigerators, mathematical and graph models of the problem and an outline of solution algorithm, based on the local search approach, are presented.