Constraint Programming for Flexible Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Repeated Jobs and Repeated Operations

Abstract

The manufacturing process relies heavily on production scheduling to guarantee effective production schedules, reduce costs and product shortages, and get away from delays, interruptions, and waste products. Scheduling issues have been effectively solved via constraint programming. In this paper, we consider a constraint programming formulation of the flexible flow shop scheduling problem with repeated jobs and operations repetitions. We also implemented seven fast heuristics and compared the results with the constraint programming solution. The results from using the CPLEX solver as a solution tool were satisfactory. Computational experiments demonstrate that using constraint programming can be significantly more advantageous than using heuristics.

Keywords

• flexible flow shop scheduling problem
• constraint programming
• heuristics