Flexible flow shop (or a hybrid flow shop) scheduling problem is an extension of classical flow shop scheduling problem. In a simple flow shop configuration, a job having ‘g’ operations is performed on ‘g’ operation centres (stages) with each stage having only one machine. If any stage contains more than one machine for providing alternate processing facility, then the problem...

The present paper is an attempt to develop a new heuristic algorithm, find the optimal sequence to minimize the utilization time of the machines and hence their rental cost for two stage specially structured flow shop scheduling under specified rental policy in which processing times and set up time are associated with their respective probabilities including transportation time. Further jo...

This paper presents a mathematical model for a flow shop scheduling problem consisting of m machine and n jobs with fuzzy processing times that can be estimated as independent stochastic or fuzzy numbers. In the traditional flow shop scheduling problem, the typical objective is to minimize the makespan). However,, two significant criteria for each schedule in stochastic models are: expectable m...

Scheduling is an important subject of production and operations management area. In flow-shop scheduling, the objective is to obtain a sequence of jobs which when processed in a fixed order of machines, will optimize some well defined criteria. The concept of transportation time is very important in scheduling. Transportation can be done by robots. In situations that robots are used to transpor...

While a great portion of the scheduling literature focuses on time-based criteria, the most important goal of management is maximizing the profitability of the firm. In this paper, the net preset value criterion is studied taking account of linear time-dependent cash flows in single machine and flow shop scheduling problems. First, a heuristic method is presented for the single machine scheduli...

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...

While a great portion of the scheduling literature focuses on time-based criteria, the most important goal of management is maximizing the profitability of the firm. In this paper, the net preset value criterion is studied taking account of linear time-dependent cash flows in single machine and flow shop scheduling problems. First, a heuristic method is presented for the single machine scheduli...

In this paper, scheduling problems in Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) are studied. The scheduling objective is to minimize the makespan. We used a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the optimization scheduling problem. We have developed one FMC with industrial characteristics with the objective of studying scheduling problems in these types of manufacturing systems (single machine scheduling...

A frequently occurring operational problem is one of processing a given number of jobs (commodities) on a specified number of machines (facilities) referred to by various investigators as scheduling, dispatching, sequencing, or combinations thereof (Gupta and Stafford, 2006). In most manufacturing environments, a set of processes is needed to be serially performed in several stages before a job...

Flexible flow shop scheduling problem (FFS) with unrelated parallel machines contains sequencing in flow shop where, at any stage, there exists one or more processors. The objective consists of minimizing the maximum completion time. Because of NP-completeness of FFS problem, it is necessary to use heuristics method to address problems of moderate to large scale problem. Therefore, for assessme...