We consider an M/G/∞ model with exponentially distributed setup times. Arrivals result in an off server starting a setup. Upon completing a setup, a server begins serving a waiting customer. Upon completing service, with probability p the server becomes eligible to serve another waiting customer. Among other things, we show, in steady state, that the number of busy servers is Poisson distribute...

Setup operations play an important role in many production environments. In this paper, the exact modeling of setup times is motivated and two mixed integer programming model formulations are proposed. These model formulations allow the representation of ‘‘long’’ setup times with respect to the length of a planning period, which are widespread in process industries. Computational results unders...

We study a scheduling problem in which jobs may be split into parts, where the parts of a split job may be processed simultaneously on more than one machine. Each part of a job requires a setup time, however, on the machine where the job part is processed. During setup, a machine cannot process or set up any other job. We concentrate on the basic case in which setup times are job-, machineand s...

In this paper we consider microfactories for manipulation and assembly. These microfactories are composed of several cells containing microrobotic systems capable of a high level of repeatability. The assembly plan of the production is a pipeline of tasks that are performed by the cells. Our aim is to manage the production flow in the case where the cells can be reconfigured to perform differen...

This paper considers the single machine scheduling problem with independent family (group) setup times where jobs in each family are processed together. A sequence independent setup is required to process a job from a different family. The objective is to minimize total tardiness. A mixed integer programming model capable of solving small sized problems is described. Several heuristic algorithm...

The flowshop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times is considered and shown to be NP-complete. A traveling salesman problem formulation is proposed for the case where jobs are processed continuously through the shop. These results are used to describe an approximate algorithm for the case where limited or infinite intermediate storage space is available to hold partially complet...

We address the problem of scheduling jobs with family setup times on identical parallel machines to minimize total weighted #owtime. We present two dynamic programming algorithms * a backward algorithm and a forward algorithm* and we identify characteristics of problems where each algorithm is best suited. We also derive two properties that improve the computational e$ciency of the algorithms.

This paper presents a new mathematical model for the problem of scheduling part families and jobs within each part family in a flow line manufacturing cell where the setup times for each family are sequence dependent and it is desired to minimize the maximum completion time of the last job on the last machine (makespan) while processing parts (jobs) in each family together. Gaining an optimal s...

This paper addresses to the permutation flowline manufacturing cell with sequence dependent family setup times problem. The objective is to minimize the makespan criterion. We propose a cooperative approach including a genetic algorithm and a branch and bound procedure. The latter is probabilistically integrated in the genetic algorithm in order to enhance the current solution. Moreover, the ap...