Robustness Analysis for the Re-entrant Flow Shop Problem
A. Bobe (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
E. Eigbe – Mentor (TU Delft - Algorithmics)
Neil Yorke-Smith – Mentor (TU Delft - Algorithmics)
M. J.T. Reinders – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Scheduling is required in almost every industry and when done well it can bring a lot of revenue. Flexibility is often forgotten when creating the initial schedules. Therefore, in case of an unexpected delay, the whole schedule has to suffer. In this paper, we consider a re-entrant flow shop with sequence-dependent setup times and relative due dates for our industrial partner, which specialises in industrial printers. Then, we perform a robustness analysis on real schedules from the industry, which can be extended to any system represented as a flow shop with relative due dates. We find how much time a schedule with relative due dates has before it becomes infeasible. We continue by empirically creating a new robustness measure and comparing it with state-of-the-art techniques. The experiments confirm that this measure can be useful in creating robust initial schedules for re-entrant flow shops with added idle time that has a minimal effect on the total duration of the solution.