Assessing scheduling policies in a permutation flowshop with common due dates

Paz Perez-Gonzalez and Jose M. Framinan

International Journal of Production Research, 2015, vol. 53, issue 19, 5742-5754

Abstract: This paper focuses onto a situation arising in most real-life manufacturing environments when scheduling has to be performed periodically. In such a scenario, different scheduling policies can be adopted, being perhaps the most common to assume that, once a set of jobs has been scheduled, their schedule cannot be modified (‘frozen’ schedule). This implies that, when the next set of jobs is to be scheduled, the resources may not be fully available. Another option is assuming that the schedule of the previously scheduled jobs can be modified as long as it does not violate their due date, which has been already possibly committed to the customer. This policy leads to a so-called multi-agent scheduling problem. The goal of this paper is to discern when each policy is more suitable for the case of a permutation flowshop with common due dates. To do so, we carry out an extensive computational study in a test bed specifically designed to control the main factors affecting the policies, so we analyse the solution space of the underlying scheduling problems. The results indicate that, when the due date of the committed jobs is tight, the multi-agent approach does not pay off in view of the difficulty of finding feasible solutions. Moreover, in such cases, the policy of ‘freezing’ the schedule of the jobs leads to a very simple scheduling problem with many good/acceptable solutions. In contrast, when the due date has a medium/high slack, the multi-agent approach is substantially better. Nevertheless, in this latter case, in order to perceive the full advantage of this policy, powerful solution procedures have to be designed, as the structure of the solution space of the latter problem makes extremely hard to find optimal/good solutions.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2014.994077 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:tprsxx:v:53:y:2015:i:19:p:5742-5754

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TPRS20

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2014.994077

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Research is currently edited by Professor A. Dolgui

More articles in International Journal of Production Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().