In this paper it is presented an improvement of the branch and bound algorithm for the permutation flow shop problem with blocking-in-process and setup times with the objective of minimizing the total flow time and tardiness, which is known to be NP-Hard when there are two or more machines involved. With that objective in mind, a new machine-based lower bound that exploits some structural properties of the problem. A database with 27 classes of problems, varying in number of jobs (n) and number of machines (m) was used to perform the computational experiments. Results show that the algorithm can deal with most of the problems with less than 20 jobs in less than one hour. Thus, the method proposed in this work can solve the scheduling of many applications in manufacturing environments with limited buffers and separated setup times.

Efficient business organizations must balance quality, cost, and time constraints in competitive environments. Reflecting the complexity of this task, we consider manufacturing systems including several stages of production chains requiring time measurement. When production scheduling is not prioritized in such enterprises, several negative effects may occur. A corporation may suffer financial penalties as well as negative brand exposure, and thus may find its credibility challenged. Therefore, in this study, we propose constructive methods to minimize a total tardiness criterion, considering preventative maintenance constraints to reflect the reality of industrial practice, focusing on a no-wait flowshop environment in which jobs are successively processed without operational interruptions. In addition to proposing constructive methods to solve the no-wait flowshop production scheduling problem, a metaheuristic is presented as an approach to improve results obtained by constructive methods. Computational experiments were designed and performed to compare several production scheduling algorithms. Among various constructive heuristics considered, an algorithm called HENLL using an insertion logic showed the best performance. The proposed metaheuristic is based on the iterated greedy (IG) search method, and the results obtained demonstrated significant improvement compared to the heuristics alone. It is expected that this study may be used by production planning and control (PPC) professionals to apply the proposed method to schedule production more efficiently. We show that the proposed method successfully presented a better solution in relation to total tardiness, considering the above mentioned environment.

The problem of generating a train schedule for a single-track railway system is addressed in this paper. A three stage scheduling is proposed to reduce the total train tardiness. We derived an appropriate job-shop scheduling algorithm called DR-algorithm. In the first stage, by determining appropriate weights of the dispatching rules, a pre-schedule is constructed. In the second stage, on the basis of the pre-schedule, the departure times of the trains are modified to reduce the number of conflicts in using railway sections by different trains. In the third stage, a train speed control helps the scheduler to change the trains’ speeds in order to reduce the train tardiness and to reach other objectives. The factual train schedule is based on the modified train speeds and on the modified departure times of the trains. The experimental running of the DR-algorithm on the benchmark instances showed this algorithm can solve train scheduling problems in a close to optimal way. In particular, the total train tardiness was reduced about 20% due to controlling train speeds and the departure times of the trains.

Flow-shop problems, as a typical manufacturing challenge, have become an interesting area of research. The primary concern is that the solution space is huge and, therefore, the set of feasible solutions cannot be enumerated one by one. In this paper, we present an efficient solution strategy based on a genetic algorithm (GA) to minimize the makespan, total waiting time and total tardiness in a flow shop consisting of n jobs and m machines. The primary objective is to minimize the job waiting time before performing the related operations. This is a major concern for some industries such as food and chemical for planning and production scheduling. In these industries, there is a probability of the decay and deterioration of the products prior to accomplishment of operations in workstation, due to the increase in the waiting time. We develop a model for a flowshop scheduling problem, which uses the planner-specified weights for handling a multi-objective optimization problem. These weights represent the priority of planning objectives given by managers. The results of the proposed GA and classic GA are analyzed by the analysis of variance (ANOVA) method and the results are discussed.

This paper considers the dynamic variant of single processor scheduling problem of minimizing total tardiness. In practice, it occurs when minimizing tardiness penalty. The problem is NP-hard; thus two heuristics were proposed. The utility of the proposed models was demonstrated through computational experiments and comparative analyses against existing solution methods and the Branch and Bound (BB) method. The results show that the proposed models yield effi-cient solutions and in most cases perform effectively better than the existing heuristics in the lit-erature.