A multicriteria decision aid tool to solve scheduling problems in an industrial application

Abstract

The production scheduling area involves the application of operations research and scheduling theory methods to solve manufacturing system problems. A specific class of problems is characterized by changeover tools in a production machine and this problem can be found in different workshops. In this problem, the main criteria can be the sequence-dependent changeover costs or set-up times, that can be modelled on the traveling salesman problem. A multicriteria version of this problem takes into account the changeover costs and time constraints such as due dates or mean tardiness which can be modelled on the time-dependent traveling salesman problem. This paper presents well known methods to solve the one machine scheduling problems with sequence-dependent changeover costs and several extensions of these methods to treat the multicriteria problem, our primary interest being to construct a decision aid tool for an industrial application.