Article history: Received 23 January 2010 Received in revised form 23 April 2010 Accepted 26 April 2010 Available online 26 April 2010 During the past two decades, there have been increasing interests on permutation flow shop with different types of objective functions such as minimizing the makespan, the weighted mean flow-time etc. The permutation flow shop is formulated as a mixed integer pr...

The Shifting Bottleneck (SB) heuristic is among the most successful approximation methods for solving the Job Shop problem. It is essentially a machine based decomposition procedure where a series of One Machine Sequencing Problems (OMSPs) are solved. However, such a procedure has been reported to be highly ineffective for the Flow Shop problems (Jain and Meeran 2002). In particular, we show th...

In this paper the resource-constrained flow shop (RCF) problem is addressed. A number of realistic extensions are incorporated, including non-serial precedence requirements, mixed flow shop situations, and the distribution of the human workforce among a number of pre-determined groups. The RCF is then solved by meta-heuristics, primarily of the evolutionary type. An extensive numerical investig...

In this paper, we consider distributed versions of a modified shifting bottleneck heuristic for complex job shops. The considered job shop environment contains parallel batching machines, machines with sequence-dependent setup times and reentrant process flows. Semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities are typical examples for manufacturing systems with these characteristics. The used performa...

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date...

This paper aims at developing hierarchical control architecture for continuous-flow simulation in order to regulate production in multiple-part-type flow shops. The approach uses a continuous-flow approximation to model the discrete flow of parts in a manufacturing system. The control strategy specifies how to allocate limited system capacity among all the part types to follow the solution of t...