A heuristic to schedule flexible job-shop in a glass factory

We describe the design and implementation of a scheduling system in a glass factory. The factory produces a large variety of manufactured glass objects in a complex process ranging from melting the glass in the furnaces and blowing it automatically or manually to decorating, assembling and packing it. The structure basically corresponds to a flexible job-shop scheduling problem with some special characteristics. On the one hand, dealing with hot liquid glass imposes no-wait constraints on some operations. On the other hand, skilled workers performing some manual tasks are modelled as special machines. The system produces approximate solutions in very short computing times, trying to minimize a non-regular criterion defined by the user and based on due dates. It can be used to establish delivery dates for new customer orders, taking into account current machine workloads, or to schedule a set of orders, trying to meet given customer due dates.

[1]  Han Hoogeveen,et al.  Scheduling multipurpose batch process industries with no-wait restrictions by simulated annealing , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[2]  Chandrasekharan Rajendran,et al.  Efficient dispatching rules for scheduling in a job shop , 1997 .

[3]  Chandrasekharan Rajendran,et al.  A comparative study of dispatching rules in dynamic flowshops and jobshops , 1999, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[4]  T. S. Raghu,et al.  An efficient dynamic dispatching rule for scheduling in a job shop , 1993 .

[5]  Christian Proust,et al.  Maximizing benefits in short-term planning in bottle-glass industry , 2000 .

[6]  Bernard W. Taylor,et al.  A comparative analysis of the COVERT job sequencing rule using various shop performance measures , 1987 .

[7]  Jean-Charles Billaut,et al.  Solving a bicriteria scheduling problem on unrelated parallel machines occurring in the glass bottle industry , 2001, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[8]  Jose M. Framiñan,et al.  Approximative procedures for no-wait job shop scheduling , 2003, Oper. Res. Lett..

[9]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Project scheduling : a research handbook , 2002 .

[10]  Lixin Tang,et al.  A mathematical programming model for scheduling steelmaking-continuous casting production , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[11]  Marc Lambrecht,et al.  Extending the shifting bottleneck procedure to real-life applications , 1996 .

[12]  Ari P. J. Vepsalainen.  Priority rules for job shops with weighted tardiness costs , 1987 .

[13]  Edward Anderson,et al.  Two new rules to minimize tardiness in a job shop , 1990 .

[14]  Józef Grabowski,et al.  Sequencing of jobs in some production system , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[15]  Dario Pacciarelli,et al.  Job-shop scheduling with blocking and no-wait constraints , 2002, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[16]  Paolo Brandimarte,et al.  Routing and scheduling in a flexible job shop by tabu search , 1993, Ann. Oper. Res..

[17]  Johann L. Hurink,et al.  Tabu search for the job-shop scheduling problem with multi-purpose machines , 1994 .

[18]  Chelliah Sriskandarajah,et al.  A Survey of Machine Scheduling Problems with Blocking and No-Wait in Process , 1996, Oper. Res..

[19]  Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès,et al.  An integrated approach for modeling and solving the general multiprocessor job-shop scheduling problem using tabu search , 1997, Ann. Oper. Res..

[20]  Jwm Will Bertrand,et al.  A dynamic priority rule for scheduling against due-dates , 1982 .