One of the most important assumptions in production scheduling is that the machines are permanently available without any breakdown. In the real world of scheduling, machines can be made unavailable due to various reasons such as preventive maintenance and unpredicted breakdown. In this paper, we explore flowshop configuration under the assumption of condition-based maintenance to minimize expe...

Flowshop scheduling problems have been extensively studied by several authors using different approaches. A typical flowshop process consists of successive manufacturing stages arranged in a single production line where different jobs have to be processed following a predefined production recipe. In this work, the scheduling of a complex flowshop process involving automated wet-etch station fro...

We investigate the problem of scheduling n jobs in s-stage hybrid flowshops with parallel identical machines at each stage. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes the sum of weighted completion times of the jobs. This problem has been proven to be NP-hard. In this paper, an integer programming formulation is constructed for the problem. A new Lagrangian relaxation algorithm is prese...

The production facilities of some factories can be considered as a flowshops. Flowshops are composed of resources arranged serially in r sections or stages where a set of n parts is processed. There are buffers between two consecutive stages. Each part has at most r operations (one per stage) and the flow of the jobs is oneway from stage 1 to stage r. In some companies of this type, the input s...

The purpose of this paper is to review some recent results that demonstrate the importance of identifying global optima of MINLP formulations. We present two global optimization “success stories” based on the application of global optimization techniques to two design problems. The first application deals with the design of Just-in-Time flowshops. On a collection of nine problem instances with ...

Recent studies have demonstrated that the performance of a simulated annealing algorithm can be improved by following multiple search paths and parallel computation. In this paper, we use these strategies to solve a comprehensive mathematical model for a flexible flowshop lot streaming problem. In flexible flowshop environment, a number of jobs will be processed in several consecutive productio...