Integrated Scheduling of Manufacturing Operations and Material Handling Tasks in the Job Shops: a Network Model

Material handling tasks in the job shops have to be coordinated with manufacturing operations in order to efficiently utilize the production resources and to reduce the accumulation of work-in-process inventory. This paper extends the traditional job shop scheduling problem by incorporating the scheduling of the material handling tasks. It provides a generic definition and a network model for the integrated scheduling problem, which can be customized to both automated systems, such as the flexible manufacturing systems, and manually operated ones. Based on the network model, an exact branch-andbound algorithm is developed for the objective of minimizing the maximum completion time of all manufacturing and material handling tasks.