A GRASP for a real-world scheduling problem with unrelated parallel print machines and sequence-dependent setup times

Manuel Iori, Alberto Locatelli and Marco Locatelli

International Journal of Production Research, 2023, vol. 61, issue 21, 7367-7385

Abstract: We consider a real-world scheduling problem arising in the colour printing industry. The problem consists in assigning print jobs to a heterogeneous set of flexographic printer machines and finding a processing sequence for the jobs assigned to each machine. The machines are characterised by a limited sequence of colour groups and can equip additional components (e.g. embossing rollers and perforating rolls) to process jobs that require specific treatments. The process to equip a machine with an additional component or to clean a colour group takes a long time, with the effect of significantly raising the setup times. The aim is to minimise a weighted sum of total weighted tardiness and total setup time. The problem derives from the activities of an Italian food packaging company. To solve it, we developed a greedy randomised adaptive search procedure equipped with several local search procedures. The excellent performance of the algorithm is proved by extensive computational experiments on real-world instances, for which it produced good-quality solutions within a limited computing time. The algorithm is currently in use at the company to support their weekly scheduling decisions.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2022.2148768

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