Download or read book Bi-criteria Group Scheduling with Sequence-dependent Setup Time in a Flow Shop written by Dongchen Lu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cellular manufacturing, which is also referred to as group technology among researchers, has primarily been used as a means to increase productivity, efficiency and flexibility. Under group technology, similar jobs, which have similar shape, material, and processing operations are assigned to the same group. Moreover, dissimilar machines are assigned to the same cell to meet the processing requirements of jobs in a group or multiple groups. Group scheduling problems have been studied extensively in the past as implementation of group technology became more prevalent in industry. However, most of the work that has been done has focused on single-criterion optimization. A bi-criteria group scheduling problem in a flow shop with sequence-dependent setup time is investigated in this research. Cellular manufacturing and flow shop are two popular scenarios in industry. To mimic real industry practice, dynamic job releases and dynamic machine availabilities are assumed. The goal is to minimize the weighted sum of total weighted completion time and total weighted tardiness, which satisfy the producer and customer goals separately. Normalized weights are assigned to both criteria to describe the trade-off between the two goals. Two different initial solution finding mechanisms are proposed, and a tabu-search based two-level search algorithm is developed to find near optimal solutions for the problem. An example problem is used to demonstrate the applicability of the search algorithm. A mathematical model is developed and implemented to evaluate the quality of the solutions obtained from the heuristics in small problem instances. Further, to uncover the difference in performance of initial solution finding mechanisms and heuristics, a detailed experimental design is performed. The results show that different heuristics have different performance in solving problems generated with different parameters.