Abstract
The focus of this paper is on the treatment of a reentrant and flexible flow shop problem in which the processing times of the jobs at some stage may depend on the decisions made for the jobs at stages before and after the current stage, that is, they may depend on the machine sequence the jobs take in the processing flow. The problem was encountered in a cutting stock application embedded in the context of a virtual organisation. A mathematical model capturing the issues of reentrancy and machine sequence dependency is given. Solution procedures using a mixed-integer programming (MIP) solver and two metaheuristics, simulated annealing and tabu search are presented. The feasibility of the approach is established by computational tests with 30 randomly generated problem instances. The optimal results were obtained for all instances up to ten clients and five service providers and one instance with 15 clients and five service providers. The rest of the results were within the limits provided by the MIP solver.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
