Development of a Hybrid Flowshop Scheduling System Considering with Due-Date and Incontrollable Processing Time for MTO Production

Abstract

This research reported the automation and optimization of hybrid flexible flowshop scheduling (HFS) for make-to-order (MTO) production, particularly for a joint research with a Japanese medium-sized company. As the first, an automated scheduling software was developed to compare several basic and advanced rules for HFS. Secondly, the optimal solution was discussed to involve both a due-date of individual job and the efficiency of parallel machines in HFS for MTO. Gupta algorithm (1988) was extended considering with different processing time of the individual job. As the result of performance evaluations for actual cases, extended Gupta method improved the due-date satisfaction rate by 15% more than the typical rules, while keeping short makespan that means machines are effectively utilized beyond process steps. In addition, computation of the proposed method is very quick (less than 0.04 seconds) even to the problem consisting of 5 machines and around 110 jobs.