Given the anticipated benefits of better solutions, the scheduling problem of minimizing the total tardiness for single machine with sequence dependent setup times continues to represent a challenge for researchers to resolve. This research presents a novel Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) algorithm for solving this problem. The MMAS algorithm adopts a new local search technique where, a position is r...

A new meta-heuristic for scheduling multiple jobs on a single machine so that they are completed by a common specified date (neither earlier, nor later) is addressed in this paper. Costs are set depending on whether a job finished before (earliness), or after (tardiness) the specified due date. The objective is to minimize the total weighted earliness and tardiness penalized costs from the spec...

Distributed arrival time control (DATC) is a highly distributed feedback control algorithm for the scheduling problems in heterarchical operation systems [V.V. Prabhu, Performance of real-time distributed arrival time control in heterarchical manufacturing systems, IIE Transactions 32 (2000) 323–331]. Although DATC has presented outstanding performance for the real-time scheduling problems in d...

This paper considers a two-stage assembly flow shop problem (TAFSP) where m machines are in the first stage and an assembly machine is in the second stage. The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of earliness and tardiness time for n available jobs. JIT seeks to identify and eliminate waste components including over production, waiting time, transportation, inventory, movement and defective...

This paper considers a complex job shop problem with reentrant flow and batch processing machines. A modified shifting bottleneck heuristic (MSB) is considered for generating machine schedules to minimize the total weighted tardiness. We observe that the MSB could produce infeasible schedules where cyclic schedules are found. A cycle elimination procedure is proposed to remove the possibility o...

The weighted earliness tardiness parallel machine scheduling problem is NP hard. It is herein approximately solved using a decentralized multi-agent system (MAS). MAS acts as a moderator of two types of agents: free jobs, and groups of jobs assigned to machines. MAS yields good solutions’ quality in reduced run times as evidenced by the computational results. Most importantly, it can be easily ...

This paper presents an approach to solve the problem of scheduling printed circuit board assemblies on single production line to minimize total weighted tardiness and total feeder setups, which are sequence dependent. Preemptive integer goal programming model is constructed to represent the bi-objective problem. Although an optimal branch-and-bound method is available, its computational require...