A General Decision Support Systems Approach to the Port Scheduling Problem for Pressure Beck Operations

Abstract

With the current proliferation of computer-based decision support systems across all types of manufacturing applications, computer-based agents for management support of textile process decisions are receiving increasing attention. One of the most potentially rewarding of these textile applications is in the area of scheduling and machine loading for the dyeing of piece goods with multi-port dyeing machines. The range of industry practices in dealing with this problem is diverse, often requiring tedious manual calculations that result in non-optimal machine loads, quality problems and a high turnover of scheduling operators. In this paper the authors report on their development of a potentially comprehensive decision support system solution to the problem. Their solution involves a two-phase approach where linear programming is used to develop optimal machine loads and a computer-based heuristic is used to schedule the activities required to load specific dyeing machines.