Abstract
This paper investigates a two-machine group scheduling problem with sequence-independent setup times and round-trip transportation times, which is derived from the production management requirements of modern steel manufacturing enterprises. The objective is to minimize the makespan. Addressing limitations in prior studies, we consider a critical but largely ignored transportation method, namely round-trip transportation, and restricted transporter capacity between machines. To solve this problem, a mixed-integer programming model is first developed. Then, the problem complexity is analyzed for situations with both single and unlimited transporters. For the NP-hard case of a single transporter, we design an efficient two-stage heuristic algorithm with proven acceptable solution quality bounds. Extensive computational experiments based on steel plant data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in providing near-optimal solutions, and the maximum deviation between our algorithm and the optimal solution is 1.38%. This research can provide an operable optimization method that is valuable for group scheduling and transportation scheduling.
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