We address a complex scheduling problem arising in the wood panel industry with the objective of minimizing a quadratic function of job tardiness. The proposed solution strategy, which is based on an effective genetic algorithm, has been coded and implemented within a major Tunisian company, leader in the wood panel manufacturing. Preliminary experimental results indicate significant decrease o...

Dynamic scheduling problems consist of both challenging combinatorics, as found in classical scheduling problems, and stochastics due to uncertainty about the arrival times, resource requirements, and processing times of jobs. To address these two challenges, we investigate the integration of queueing theory and scheduling. The former reasons about long-run stochastic system characteristics, wh...

The assembly flowshop scheduling problem has been studied recently due to its applicability in real life scheduling problems. It arises when various fabrication operations are performed concurrently in one stage. It was firstly introduced by Lee et al. (1993) in a flowshop environment. Later, Potts et al. (1995) considered the two-stage assembly flowshop problem with m concurrent operations in ...

This paper investigates how to adapt a discrepancy-based search method to solve two-stage hybrid flowshop scheduling problems in which each stage consists of several identical machines operating in parallel. The objective is to determine a schedule that minimizes the makespan. We present an adaptation of the Climbing Depth-bounded Discrepancy Search (CDDS) method based on Johnson’s rule and on ...

Two-machine flowshop scheduling to minimize makespan is one of the most well-known classical scheduling problems. Johnson's rule for solving this problem has been widely cited in the literature. We introduce in this paper the concept of composite job, which is an artificially constructed job with processing times such that it will incur the same amount of idle time on the second machine as that...

A flow line is a conventional manufacturing system where all jobs must be processed on all machines with the same operation sequence. Line buffers allow non-permutation flowshop scheduling (NPFS) and job sequences to be changed on different machines. A mixed-integer linear programming model for non-permutation flowshop scheduling and the buffer requirement along with manufacturing implication i...