C Rajendran

In this paper we deal with the problem of scheduling in a kanban-controlled flowshop with material handling and finite input and output buffer storage between workstations. The objective is to minimise the makespan of containers. A heuristic algorithm, based on the simulated annealing (SA) technique, is developed. We present a new perturbation scheme and test the effectiveness of the proposed simulated annealing algorithm for solving the kanban-controlled flowshop scheduling problems. The proposed SA algorithm is evaluated relative to the existing heuristic. The results of the computational evaluation reveal that the proposed SA algorithm performs better than the existing heuristic.

An experimental investigation of the performance of dispatching rules and a heuristic for scheduling in static flowshops with missing operations is undertaken in this study. The measure of performance is the minimization of total flow time of jobs. Permutation schedules are generated by using the heuristic for scheduling. General schedules, which can be permutation or non-permutation schedules, are obtained by using dispatching rules. Four dispatching rules, including a new dispatching rule, are considered. Two types of flowshops are studied: one with no missing operations of jobs and another with missing operations of jobs. In the latter type of flowshops, jobs with varying number of missing operations are considered. An extensive investigation of the performance of the dispatching rules and the heuristic is carried out. It is observed that the heuristic minimizes total flow time of jobs more than dispatching rules up to a certain level of missing operations of jobs in flowshops, after which dispatching rules perform better. The performance of the heuristic and the dispatching rules in terms of minimizing the makespan as a secondary measure is also reported. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V.

Efficient heuristics for scheduling jobs in a static flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times of jobs are presented in this paper. The objective is to minimize the sum of weighted flowtime and weighted tardiness of jobs. Two heuristic preference relations are used to construct a good heuristic permutation sequence of jobs. Thereafter, an improvement scheme is implemented, once and twice, on the heuristic sequence to enhance the quality of the solution. An existing heuristic, a random search procedure and a greedy local search are used as benchmark methods for relatively evaluating the proposed heuristics. An extensive performance analysis has shown that the proposed heuristics are computationally faster and more effective in yielding solutions of better quality than the benchmark procedures. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper, bounding strategies for determining a lower bound on the completion time of a job sequenced in each position in the permutation sequence on each machine in permutation flowshop scheduling problem with minimisation of total flowtime of jobs as objective are discussed. Basically, the bounding strategies are machine-based bounding strategies used for determining the lower bound on total flowtime of jobs for all the small-sized and large-sized benchmark flowshop scheduling problem instances proposed by Vallada et al. (2015). The lower bound matrix can be pruned as tightening constraints into the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model with objective of minimisation of total flowtime of jobs. Since the flowshop scheduling problem with total flowtime objective is difficult, two kinds of linear programming (LP) relaxation methods are used for determining an LP-based lower bound on total flowtime of jobs for some benchmark problem instances proposed by Vallada et al. (2015).

The problem of scheduling in permutation flowshops is considered with the objective of minimizing the makespan, followed by the consideration of minimization of total flowtime of jobs. Two ant-colony optimization algorithms are proposed and analyzed for solving the permutation flowshop scheduling problem. The first algorithm extends the ideas of the ant-colony algorithm by Stuetzle [Proceedings of the 6th European Congress on Intelligent Techniques and Soft Computing (EUFIT '98), vol. 3, Verlag Mainz, Aachen, Germany, 1998, p. 1560], called max-min ant system (MMAS), by incorporating the summation rule suggested by Merkle and Middendorf [Proceedings of the EvoWorkshops 2000, Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1803, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000, p. 287] and a newly proposed local search technique. The second ant-colony algorithm is newly developed. The proposed ant-colony algorithms have been applied to 90 benchmark problems taken from Taillard [European Journal of Operational Research 64 (1993) 278]. First, a comparison of the solutions yielded by the MMAS and the two ant-colony algorithms developed in this paper, with the heuristic solutions given by Taillard [European Journal of Operational Research 64 (1993) 278] is undertaken with respect to the minimization of makespan. The comparison shows that the two proposed ant-colony algorithms perform better, on an average, than the MMAS. Subsequently, by considering the objective of minimizing the total flowtime of jobs, a comparison of solutions yielded by the proposed ant-colony algorithms with the best heuristic solutions known for the benchmark problems, as published in an extensive study by Liu and Reeves [European Journal of Operational Research 132 (2001) 439], is carried out. The comparison shows that the proposed ant-colony algorithms are clearly superior to the heuristics analyzed by Liu and Reeves. For 83 out of 90 problems considered, better solutions have been found by the two proposed ant-colony algorithms, as compared to the solutions reported by Liu and Reeves. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Though the designers of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) strive to ensure the maximum flexibility in the system, in practice, after the implementation of such systems the operational executives often find it hard to accommodate frequent variations in the part designs of incoming jobs. This difficulty can very well be overcome by scheduling the variety of incoming parts into the system efficiently. In this work an appropriate scheduling mechanism is designed to generate a nearer-to-optimum schedule using Genetic Algorithm (GA) with two different GA Coding Schemes. Two contradictory objectives of the system were achieved simultaneously by the scheduling mechanism. The results are compared with those obtained by different scheduling rules and conclusions are presented.

The problem of scheduling in dynamic conventional jobshops has been extensively investigated over many years. However, the problem of scheduling in assembly jobshops (i.e. shops that manufacture multi-level jobs with components and subassemblies) has been relatively less investigated in spite of the fact that assembly jobshops are frequently encountered in real life. A survey of literature on dynamic assembly jobshop scheduling has revealed that the TWKR-RRP rule is the best one for minimizing the mean flowtime and staging delay, and the job due-date (JDD) rule is the best for minimizing the mean tardiness of jobs. However, the objectives of minimizing the maximum flowtime (and maximum staging delay) and standard deviation of flowtime (and standard deviation of staging delay) are as important as the minimization of mean flowtime and mean staging delay. Likewise, the objectives of minimizing the maximum tardiness and standard deviation of tardiness are also as important as the minimization of mean tardiness. The reason is that the maximum and standard deviation values of a performance measure indicate the worst-case performance of a dispatching rule. The present study seeks to develop efficient dispatching rules to minimize the maximum and standard deviation of flowtime and staging delay, and the maximum and the standard deviation of conditional tardiness of jobs. The dispatching rules are based on the computation of the earliest completion time of a job and consequently determining the latest finish time of operations on components/subassemblies of a job. An extensive simulation-based investigation of the performance evaluation of the existing dispatching rules and the proposed dispatching rules has been carried out by randomly generating jobs with different structures and different shop utilization levels. It has been found from the simulation study that the proposed rules are quite effective in minimizing the maximum and standard deviation of flowtime and staging delay, and the maximum conditional tardiness and standard deviation of conditional tardiness. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The problem of scheduling in a static flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times of jobs (FSDS) is considered in this paper. A new heuristic to minimize the sum of weighted flowtime of jobs in a FSDS is proposed. An improvement scheme is supplemented to enhance the quality of the heuristic solution. An extensive computational performance analysis has shown that the proposed heuristic is computationally faster and more effective in yielding solutions of better quality than the existing heuristic. An interesting observation is that even though the proposed heuristic aims to minimize the sum of weighted flowtime of jobs (just like the existing heuristic), it fares much better than the existing heuristic in minimizing the maximum weighted flowtime of a job too. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

This study has been carried out in a sugar industry located in Tamil Nadu, India. During the production period, the plant is shut down for a couple of shifts for periodic overhauling, corrective and minor preventive maintenance activities, and inspections. This periodic shutdown is necessary because in the event of breakdown of machines, the plant is forced to crush the same amount of cane (that would have been crushed during the breakdown period) towards the end of the season when the recovery factor is low. The problem is to determine the frequency of this periodic shutdown maintenance in order to minimize the downtime losses that are time-dependent. A simulation model is developed towards this endeavor. © 1993.

Most dispatching rules for job shop scheduling assume that the cost of holding per unit time is the same for all jobs. Likewise, it is assumed that the cost of tardiness per unit time is the same for all jobs. In other words, it is implied that the holding cost of a job is directly proportional to its flowtime, and the tardiness cost of a job is directly proportional to its positive lateness. These assumptions may not hold good in all situations. Some attempts were made to overcome this deficiency, and a couple of dispatching rules were proposed by considering different weights or penalties for different jobs. However, these dispatching rules assume that the holding and tardiness costs per unit time of a given job are the same, even though these costs may differ from job to job in practice. In this study, we propose dispatching rules by explicitly considering different weights or penalties for flowtime and tardiness of a job. Many measures of performance related to weighted flowtime and weighted tardiness of jobs are considered, and the results of simulation are presented. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.