Abstract
Production management of perishable goods is highly complex and requires well-informed decisions in corresponding stages. In such production environments, scheduling problems with time constraints are of high relevance to ensure the timely flow of the work-in-process material and goods. This study introduces the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with release times (NWFSP-RT) to help advance decision support systems in the food production industry. For this purpose, an original mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is proposed for minimizing makespan. A BS algorithm, and an improved variant, the local search-based Beam Search (BSLS) algorithms are developed to solve the NWFSP-RT problem. Extensive numerical analysis is conducted to analyze the performance of the algorithms in solving this highly intractable extension of the scheduling problems. We showed that BSLS effectively avoids early convergence and local optimality while dismissing non-promising search directions within a partial enumeration solution approach. The statistical analysis confirmed that the improved BS algorithm performs better in terms of solution quality. Applications of the developed heuristic are worthwhile research topics to pursue in solving other complex optimization problems.
Highlights
No-wait scheduling problems (NWSP) have received recent recognition due to the wide industrial applications in steel manufacturing [1], metal, plastic, chemical, and food industries [2] as well as the modern manufacturing environments [3]
Many studies focused on developing solution algorithms to solve the single-machine scheduling with release times; Genetic Algorithm (GA; [17]), learning-based Branch-andbound of [18], [19], Simulated Annealing of [20], Ant Colony Optimization of [21], and the hybrid GA developed by [22] are the seminal examples
MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION Following the well-known three-field notation suggested by [105], the NWFSP-RT problem can be denoted as Fm nwt, rj Cmax, with Fm determining the flowshop production environment; Cmax specifying makespan as the objective value, and nwt, rj pointing out the no-wait and release time settings
Summary
No-wait scheduling problems (NWSP) have received recent recognition due to the wide industrial applications in steel manufacturing [1], metal, plastic, chemical, and food industries [2] as well as the modern manufacturing environments [3]. Reference [32] proposed heuristics for solving flowshops with delivery times, which is a variety of job release dates These studies did not consider the no-wait production situation that is necessary for some industrial applications, as well as the advanced manufacturing environments featured by just-in-time production. The no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with release time (NWFSP-RT) is, of high relevance in the optimization of production operations in canned-food and other similar industries. This work contributes to the advancement of decision support systems in the food production industry meeting the practical requirements for solving this computationally intractable scheduling extension.
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