A heuristic scheduling method for the pipe-spool fabrication process

Abstract

The pipe-spool fabrication process is a critical operational section in the piping projects that usually used to accelerate and discipline the installation process, especially, when we have a particular deadline for the project. For this reason, the fast and optimal scheduling of the fabrication activities with considering the real conditions and using manual or traditional methods is a significant problem for the decision-makers. In this paper, we use a novel linear programming model to schedule the spool fabrication activities based on the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). Because FJSP is a challengeable NP-hard problem, we solve the proposed mathematical model with a heuristic scheduling method based on the priority dispatching rules. Meanwhile, a mathematical lower bound is extended for the scheduling problem to show the correctness of the proposed method. Finally, some numerical results validate the quality of the proposed method, based on the comparison analysis.