In this paper, the problem of lot sizing, scheduling and delivery of several items in a two-stage supply chain over a finite planning horizon is studied. Single supplier via a flexible flow line production system (FFL), produces several items and delivers them directly to an assembly facility. Based on basic period (BP) strategy, a new mixed zero-one nonlinear programming model has been develop...

In this article we present an Ant Colony Optimization approach to the Flow Shop Problem. ACO is a new algorithmic approach, inspired by the foraging behavior of real ants, that can be applied to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. Artificial ants are used to construct solutions for Flow Shop Problems that subsequently are improved by a local search procedure. Comparisons with o...

This paper considers our work in progress on the problem of scheduling production activities in a real-life manufacturing plant. The problem is modelled as a two-stage flexible flow shop problem with minimization of the makespan and the number of tardy jobs. The design approach of an evolutionary algorithm is described. Preliminary experiments are performed and results obtained show the improve...

In many industrial sectors, decision makers are faced with large and complex problems that are often multi-objective. Many of these problems may be expressed as a combinatorial optimization problem in which we define one or more objective functions that we are trying to optimize. Thus, the car sequencing problem in an assembly line is a well known combinatorial optimization problem that cars ma...

In this paper we present the integration of an ant-based algorithm with a greedy algorithm for solving the scheduling of a multi-stage plant. A multi-stage manufacturing plant is comprised of different stages: mixing, storage, packing and finished goods storage, and is an extension of the classic Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (FSP). The algorithmic details for the Multi Stage Flow Shop Schedulin...

this study investigates the coordination of production scheduling and maintenance planning in theflow shop scheduling environment. the problem is considered in a bi-objective form, minimizing themakespan as the production scheduling criterion and minimizing the system unavailability as themaintenance planning criterion. the time interval between consecutive maintenance activities as well as the...

In this paper computational results are presented with a very general, yet powerful backtracking procedure for solving the duration minimization and net present value maximization problems in a precedence and resource-constrained network. These networks are generally of the PERT/CPM variety, although it is not required that they be so. Among the advantages cited for our approach are low compute...

In shop scheduling, several applications exist where it is required that some components perform consecutively. We refer to no-idle schedules if machines are required to operate with no inserted idle time and no-wait schedules if tasks cannot wait between the end of an operation and the start of the following one. We consider here no-idle/no-wait shop scheduling problems with makespan as perfor...