Analysis of dispatching rules application on scheduling problem in flexible-flow shop production

Abstract

In this paper we analyzed a group of simple heuristic methods, which are used for solving the scheduling problem in manufacturing and services. The analysis was performed on the scheduling problem in a flexible-flow shop production, which is known by the English term - Flexible-Flow Shop (FFS). The task is to determine the schedule of processing multiple products on multiple machines, where all the products have the same sequence of processing and for each process there are multiple machines available. For this FFS problem we present the corresponding mathematical model of mixed integer programming. Among potential methods for solving the set task, we consider simple heuristics because the original scheduling problem is NP-hard and finding the exact optimal solution would require unacceptably long computing time. Heuristic methods are based on priority rules that are performed based on the relations of importance between products and their processing time on individual machines. Heuristic methods are widely used for solving practical problems, which was the motivation for the analysis performed in this paper. The aim of the analysis is to identify those priority rules, from a set of considered, which provide a good solution to a hypothetical scheduling problem example, where the evaluation of solution is performed using different criteria functions. The analysis that is presented in the paper was obtained by using the computer program LEKIN. The main results of the analysis indicated that priority rules give different solutions to the problem of FFS and that each of these solutions is a significantly good result in terms of some of the considered criteria functions.

Keywords

• Scheduling
• flow shop
• flexible-flow shop (FFS)
• dispatching (priority) rules