An advanced load adjustment approach without task interruption for flow-shops

This paper presents a new load adjustment approach by overlapping, for flow-shop organised firms, guaranteeing the existence of a limited capacity schedule without scheduling (with no task interruption). Firstly, we present a literature review concerning finite capacity planning approaches. Secondly, we introduce the overlapping load adjustment approach. Thirdly, we propose a solution for the problem of task interruption. Subsequently, we present an original heuristic when using this approach in the case of flow-shop organised firms. This approach is based on a judicious distribution of the manufacturing order’s margins between tasks in a just-in-time context. Then, we expound the results of the experiments. Finally, we discuss a more general use of this approach.