Flow shop scheduling to minimize the total completion time with a permanently present operator: Models and ant colony optimization metaheuristic

This paper studies the one-operator m-machine flow shop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the total completion time. In this problem, the processing of jobs and setup of machines require the continuous presence of a single operator. We compare three different mathematical formulations and propose an ant colony optimization based metaheuristic to solve this flow shop scheduling problem. A series of experiments are carried out to compare the properties of three formulations and to investigate the performance of the proposed ant colony optimization metaheuristic. The computational results show that (1) an assignment-based formulation performs best, and (2) the ant colony optimization based metaheuristic is a computationally efficient algorithm.

[1]  D. M. Deighton,et al.  Computers in Operations Research , 1977, Aust. Comput. J..

[2]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  The hyper-cube framework for ant colony optimization , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics).

[3]  T. C. Edwin Cheng,et al.  Scheduling a Single Server in a Two-machine Flow Shop , 2003, Computing.

[4]  Chris N. Potts,et al.  Approximation algorithms for two-machine flow shop scheduling with batch setup times , 1998, Math. Program..

[5]  Celia A. Glass,et al.  Scheduling for Parallel Dedicated Machines with a Single Server , 2000 .

[6]  Chris N. Potts,et al.  Scheduling with batching: A review , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[7]  Thomas Stützle,et al.  Ant Colony Optimization Theory , 2004 .

[8]  Y. P. Aneja,et al.  Scheduling production of common components at a single facility , 1990 .

[9]  Chelliah Sriskandarajah,et al.  Parallel machine scheduling with a common server , 2000, Discret. Appl. Math..

[10]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Ant colony optimization , 2006, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine.

[11]  E.L. Lawler,et al.  Optimization and Approximation in Deterministic Sequencing and Scheduling: a Survey , 1977 .

[12]  Mohammed Fazle Baki,et al.  Some Problems in One-Operator Scheduling , 1999 .

[13]  Mauro Birattari,et al.  Tuning Metaheuristics - A Machine Learning Perspective , 2009, Studies in Computational Intelligence.

[14]  Guoqing Wang,et al.  Complexity results for flow-shop problems with a single server , 2005, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[15]  Fazle Baki,et al.  One-Operator, Two-Machine Open Shop And Flow Shop Scheduling With Setup Times For Machines And Maximum Lateness Objective , 2003 .

[16]  T.C.E. Cheng,et al.  A note on scheduling alternative operations in two-machine flowshops , 1998, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[17]  Chelliah Sriskandarajah,et al.  One-operator-two-machine flowshop scheduling with setup and dismounting times , 1999, Comput. Oper. Res..

[18]  Raymond G. Vickson,et al.  BATCHING AND SEQUENCING OF COMPONENTS AT A SINGLE FACILITY , 1993 .

[19]  Chris N. Potts,et al.  Scheduling the production of two-component jobs on a single machine , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[20]  Chung-Piaw Teo,et al.  Asymptotically optimal schedules for single-server flow shop problems with setup costs and times , 2005, Oper. Res. Lett..

[21]  Svetlana A. Kravchenko,et al.  Parallel machine scheduling problems with a single server , 1997 .

[22]  Jadranka Skorin-Kapov,et al.  Scheduling a flow-line manufacturing cell: a tabu search approach , 1993 .

[23]  Kenneth R. Baker,et al.  Scheduling the production of components at a common facility , 1988 .

[24]  Peter Brucker,et al.  Complexity results for parallel machine problems with a single server , 2002 .

[25]  Raymond G. Vickson,et al.  One-operator, two-machine open shop and flow shop problems with setup times for machines and weighted number of tardy jobs objective , 2004, Optim. Methods Softw..

[26]  Yih-Long Chang,et al.  A simulated annealing approach to scheduling a manufacturing cell , 1990 .