A two-stage flow-shop scheduling problem with incompatible job families and limited waiting time. Issue 3 (3rd March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Li, Yonglin; Dai, Zhenhua
• Is Part Of: Engineering optimization. Volume 52:Issue 3(2020)
• Page Start: 484
• Page End: 506
• Publication Date: 2020-03-03
• Subjects: Scheduling -- two-stage flow-shop -- parallel batch -- limited waiting time -- incompatible job families; Engineering design -- Periodicals; Mathematical optimization -- Periodicals; 620.0042
• DOI: 10.1080/0305215X.2019.1593974
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-215X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article presents a two-stage flow-shop problem with a batch machine followed by a discrete machine to minimize makespan. Jobs from incompatible job families should be processed on the discrete machine within a limited waiting time after completion of the batch process, which deviates from the instability of intermediate products in many industries, such as semiconductor and metal-rolling industries. Tight lower bounds and three heuristics are developed based on the problem's properties. Then, a hybrid membrane computing metaheuristic called the HMC algorithm is proposed, in which a dynamic membrane structure is applied to perform effective exploration, and a variable neighbourhood search is embedded in each iteration. In addition, a problem-dependent speed-up neighbourhood is employed to improve the efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.