Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) readily addresses the dynamic needs of the customers in terms of variety and quality. At present, there is a need to produce a wide range of quality products in limited time span. On-time delivery of customers’ orders is critical in make-to-order (MTO) manufacturing systems. The completion time of the orders depends on several factors including arrival rate, ...

A batch process is a discontinuous and concurrent process which is suitable for multi-product, small-sized production. The distinctive feature of a batch process is that various decision making processes, such as scheduling, design, operation, etc. are strongly connected with each other. Interaction among these processes is necessary to dynamically and flexibly cope with a variety of unplanned ...

While sophisticated systems for both process control and production planning enjoy a wide industrial acceptance, tools for batch process scheduling represent a serious gap in the fully automated batch plant. Despite over fifteen years of academic research in batch scheduling algorithms and Moore’s law increases in computing power, spreadsheets and calculators remain the state-of-the-art means f...

counts; Second, the tunable transmitters not only generate downstream data traffic but also provide ONUs with optical Continuous Wave (CW) bursts for upstream transmissions. To provide efficient bidirectional transmissions between OLT and ONUs, we propose a batch scheduling algorithm based on the sequential scheduling algorithm previously studied. The key idea is to provide room for optimizatio...

A batch machine is a machine that can process up to c jobs simultaneously as a batch, and the processing time of the batch is equal to the longest processing time of the jobs assigned to it. In this paper, we deal with the complexity of scheduling an unbounded batch machine, i.e., c = +∞. We prove that minimizing total tardiness is binary NP-hard, which has been an open problem in the literatur...

This paper presents industrial experience with a resource-constrained batch process scheduling program. The batch process representation is loosely based on the ISA S88 batch process standard. This representation allows the import of batch process information from other software, e.g. batch process simulators. The scheduling algorithm is a non-optimization approach that proceeds in two steps. F...

We present a new solution approach for short-term planning of batch production, which decomposes the problem into batching and batch scheduling. Batching converts the primary requirements for products into individual batches. We formulate the batching problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear program, which can be solved by standard software. Batch scheduling allocates the batches to scarce resource...