Operations and Shipment Scheduling of a Batch on a Felxible Machine

Seyed M. R. Iravani (), John A. Buzacott () and Morton J. M. Posner ()
Additional contact information
Seyed M. R. Iravani: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
John A. Buzacott: Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J IP3
Morton J. M. Posner: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem, Israel

Operations Research, 2003, vol. 51, issue 4, 585-601

Abstract: We consider processing and shipment scheduling of a batch of size M jobs on a flexible (multifunctional) machine. All jobs in the batch require the same sequence of N operations on the machine. Costs are incurred in the forms of holding costs of jobs waiting for the next operation, setup costs whenever the machine is set up for a new operation, and shipment cost whenever the whole batch or a part of it is shipped to the customer. Using a dynamic programming formulation of the problem, we first show how the problem size increases in M and N . Then, by focusing on the properties of some classes of batch-splitting policies, a heuristic algorithm is presented that generates suboptimal policies. Some numerical results are provided which show that the algorithm performs very well.

Keywords: Production/scheduling; approximation/heuristic: flexible machine scheduling; Transportation; scheduling: integrated production and transportation model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.51.4.585.16095 (application/pdf)

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:inm:oropre:v:51:y:2003:i:4:p:585-601

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().