Two-machine flow shop scheduling of polyurethane foam production

Bertrand M.T. Lin, Y.-Y. Lin and K.-T. Fang

International Journal of Production Economics, 2013, vol. 141, issue 1, 286-294

Abstract: This paper studies a two-machine flow shop scheduling problem with a supporting precedence relation. The model originates from a real production context of a chemical factory that produces foam-rubber products. We extend the traditional two-machine flow shop by dividing the operations into two categories: supporting tasks and regular jobs. In the model, several different compositions of foam rubber can be mixed at the foam blooming stage, and products are processed at the manufacturing stage. Each job (product) on the second machine cannot start until its supporting tasks (parts) on the first machine are all finished and the second machine is not occupied. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes the total job completion time. The studied problem is strongly NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm incorporating a lower bound and two dominance rules. We also design a simple heuristic and an iterated local search (ILS) algorithm to derive approximate solutions. The performances of the proposed algorithms are examined through computational experiments.

Keywords: Polyurethane foam; Flow shop; Precedence constraints; Branch-and-bound algorithm; Heuristic; Iterative local search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527312003374
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:141:y:2013:i:1:p:286-294

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2012.08.006

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 ().