Cyclic Scheduling in Interlaced and Non-Interlaced Mode

This paper deals with a manufacturing system which provides on the output a fixed mixture of various products in a repetitive series. The system works accordingly to so called job-shop strategy, namely each product has its own independent technological route, various for different products. Based on our own achievements obtained for classical job shop batch scheduling problem, we propose the cyclic manufacturing strategies for so called non-interlaced and interlaced modes. Proposed approach differs significantly from those known so far in the literature and is much more advantageous, due to lesser computational complexity and faster convergence to the optimal solution. We proposes some new properties useful for finding the minimal cycle time for fixed (given) job processing order on the base of graph paths as well as special features of the problem.