Simultaneous production planning and scheduling in a hybrid flow shop with time periods and work shifts

Simultaneous production planning and scheduling has been identified as one of the most important factors that affect the efficient implementation of planning and scheduling operations for the production systems. In this paper, simultaneous production planning and scheduling is applied in a hybrid flow shop environment, which has numerous applications in real industrial settings. In this problem, it is assumed that each time period includes a number of discontinuous intervals called work shifts. A novel mixed integer linear programming model is formulated. Since this problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, a new heuristic algorithm is developed to construct a complete schedule from a solution matrix that is embedded in the proposed Tabu search. A number of test problems have been solved to compare the performance of the proposed method with the exact method. The results show that the proposed tabu search is an effective and efficient method for simultaneous production planning and scheduling in hybrid flow shop systems.