Scheduling a tempered glass manufacturing system: a three-stage hybrid flow shop model
针对中国钢化玻璃制造企业的三阶段混合流水车间调度问题，建立整数规划模型最小化完工时间，并提出构造式启发、遗传算法和模拟退火算法求解大规模实例。
Chinese tempered glass has entered a fast and stable growing era. To improve the productivity of tempered glass manufacturers, this paper investigates a scheduling problem in tempered glass production system, originated from a tempered glass manufacturer in China. This problem can be formulated as a three-stage hybrid flow shop (HFS). Single and batch processing machines coexist in this HFS. Besides, a limited buffer, between the first two stages, and machine eligibility requirement are also significant characteristics. To address this complicated scheduling problem, we first establish an integer programming model with the objective of minimising the makespan, i.e. the maximum completion time of jobs in the system. Due to the strong NP-hard nature of the problem, we then propose a constructive heuristic method, a genetic algorithm, as well as a simulated annealing algorithm, to solve practical large-scale problems. Computational results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approaches.