Centralized Rescheduling Approach against Autonomous Control Approach in Dynamic Flexible Flow Shop in the Presence of Machine Breakdowns

In the current paper, we study the concept of dynamic scheduling in flexible flow Shop with limited carrier under stochastic machine breakdowns and processing time. In most flexible flow shop scheduling methods reported in the literature consider a determinist environment, where all data of the problem are known in advance. Most of these works focused on the development of methods to produce a feasible schedule of good quality in short time computing. However, real systems are stochastic and dynamic such that the initial generated schedule must deal with the presence of a variety of unexpected disruptions that may occur dynamically and cause deviations from the initial schedule. To cope with machine breakdowns and stochastic processing time, a centralized heuristic based on local search simulated annealing algorithm is used to implement the reactive scheduling for the dynamic scheduling problem. This centralized heuristic method will be compared with a decentralized autonomous approach. In order to evaluate the performance of the both developed approaches two performance measures, namely the average flow time and the makespan, were be used.