A Distributed Routing Concept for Dynamic Flexible Flowshop Problems with Unrelated Parallel Machines

The flexible flowshop problem is a well known and common challenge. Extended with unrelated parallel machines and especially with the dynamic aspect of distributed release times, the problem gets very ‘close to reality’. Triggered by the growing complexity of logistic systems, the paradigm of central planning is being shifted to decentralised control. As part of this, an autonomous control concept was developed for the field of transport logistics called Distributed Logistics Routing Protocol (DLRP), which has been proposed before. The work presented in this paper will focus on a new developed Routing Protocol, which was transferred from transport logistic to the dynamic flexible flowshop problem. In order to evaluate the new DLRP concept, various common scheduling algorithms are taken as reference. Problem instances are defined and solved by the DLRP and the reference algorithms. The results of this evaluation are shown and discussed.