Scheduling a flow shop with combined buffer conditions

Shi Qiang Liu and Erhan Kozan

International Journal of Production Economics, 2009, vol. 117, issue 2, 371-380

Abstract: In this paper, four inter-machine buffer conditions (i.e. no-wait, no-buffer, limited-buffer and infinite-buffer) in a flow shop are investigated. These four different buffer conditions are combined to generate a more generalised and more comprehensive scheduling problem, which can cover the classical flow-shop scheduling (FSS) with unlimited buffer, the blocking FSS (BFSS) without buffer, the no-wait FSS (NWFSS) and the limited-buffer FSS (LBFSS) problems. By analysing the structural properties of these four buffer conditions, an innovative constructive algorithm called the Liu-Kozan algorithm is proposed to build the feasible combined-buffer flow-shop scheduling (CBFSS) solution. The proposed Liu-Kozan algorithm mainly comprises a time-determination procedure and a tune-up procedure with eight sets of formulae. Detailed numerical implementations have been analysed to indicate that the proposed Liu-Kozan algorithm is very generic because without modification it enables the construction of the feasible solutions for the FSS, BFSS, NWFSS, LBFSS and CBFSS problems. By employing the similar mechanism of the well-known NEH algorithm, a two-stage hybrid heuristic algorithm called the Liu-Kozan-BIH algorithm is developed to find a good CBFSS schedule in an efficient and economical way.

Keywords: Scheduling; Flow; shop; Blocking; No-wait; Limited-buffer; Combined-buffer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925-5273(08)00378-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:117:y:2009:i:2:p:371-380

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().