Flexible job shop with continuous material flow

A. Bożek and M. Wysocki

International Journal of Production Research, 2015, vol. 53, issue 4, 1273-1290

Abstract: A new scheduling problem, the continuous flow flexible job shop (CF-FJS) is proposed. The formulation combines the well-known flexible job shop (FJS) problem and a dedicated continuous material flow model (MFM). In the MFM, operations are represented by material flow functions derived by integration of arbitrarily defined speed patterns. Two main concepts of the MFM formalism, i.e. variable speed of processing and continuous material flow, lead to position-dependent processing times and overlapping in operations which extend standard FJS formulation. Properties of the CF-FJS are investigated. A tabu search sched uling algorithm utilising these properties is proposed. Effective neighbourhood functions are defined based on elimination approaches. Two auxiliary procedures: search intensification level switching and fast feasibility detection are added to improve algorithm efficiency. The algorithm is verified using dedicated benchmark instances which comprise non-trivial representations of the CF-FJS specific features, i.e. machine efficiency patterns and minimum inter-operation buffers. The research is motivated by task scheduling in a fastener factory, but the presented results can be useful in many domains, such as production of granular goods, steel details, glass and fluids. The solution can be used in real-world applications. The published results can be helpful in testing new CF-FJS scheduling algorithms.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2014.955925 (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:4:p:1273-1290

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

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2014.955925

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 ().