A Scheduling Problem in the Baking Industry

Abstract

This paper addresses a scheduling problem in an actual industrial environment of a baking industry where production rates have been growing every year and the need for optimized planning becomes increasingly important in order to address all the features presented by the problem. This problem contains relevant aspects of production, such as parallel production, setup time, batch production, and delivery date. We will also consider several aspects pertaining to transportation, such as the transportation capacity with different vehicles and sales production with several customers. This approach studies an atypical problem compared to those that have already been studied in literature. In order to solve the problem, we suggest two approaches: using the greedy heuristic and the genetic algorithm, which will be compared to small problems with the optimal solution solved as an integer linear programming problem, and we will present results for a real example compared with its upper bounds. The work provides us with a new mathematical formulation of scheduling problem that is not based on traveling salesman problem. It considers delivery date and the profit maximization and not the makespan minimization. And it also provides an analysis of the algorithms runtime.