Reactive scheduling is often been criticized for its inability to provide timely optimized and stable schedules. So far, the extant literature has focused on generating schedules that optimize shop floor efficiency. Only a few have considered optimizing both shop floor efficiency and schedule stability. This paper applies a unique selfadaptation mechanism of the ant colony optimization (ACO) al...

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...

In this paper we study specially structured two stage flow shop scheduling problem with jobs in a string of disjoint job blocks having sequence independent setup times separated from processing times each associated with their respective probabilities including job weightage. In flow shop scheduling optimization of elapsed time may not always result in optimization of utilization time. Here, th...

Genetic algorithms are a very popular heuristic which have been successfully applied to many optimization problems within the last 30 years. In this chapter, we give a survey on some genetic algorithms for shop scheduling problems. In a shop scheduling problem, a set of jobs has to be processed on a set of machines such that a specific optimization criterion is satisfied. According to the restr...

In recent times flexible manufacturing systems emerged as a powerful technology to meet the continuous changing customer demands. Increase in the performance of flexible manufacturing systems is expected as a result of integration of the shop floor activities such as machine and vehicle scheduling. The authors made an attempt to integrate machine and vehicle scheduling with an objective to mini...

This thesis deals mainly with makespan minimization in Flow-Shop and hybrid Flow-Shop scheduling problems where mixed blocking constraints are considered. In Flow-Shop scheduling problem, a set of N jobs must be executed on a set of M machines. All jobs require the same operation order that must be executed according to the same manufacturing process. Each machine can only execute one job at an...

In the classical job shop scheduling problem (JSSP), n jobs are processed to completion on m unrelated machines. Each job requires processing on each machine exactly once. For each job, technology constraints specify a complete, distinct routing which is fixed and known in advance. Processing times are sequence-independent, fixed, and known in advance. Each machine is continuously available fro...