BPSS: a scheduling support system for the packaging industry
Operations Research
Hybrid flow shop scheduling: a survey
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A new approach to solve hybrid flow shop scheduling problems by artificial immune system
Future Generation Computer Systems - Special issue: Computational science of lattice Boltzmann modelling
Modeling realistic hybrid flexible flowshop scheduling problems
Computers and Operations Research
A memetic algorithm for the flexible flow line scheduling problem with processor blocking
Computers and Operations Research
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Integrating simulation and optimization to schedule a hybrid flow shop with maintenance constraints
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
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Though scheduling problems have been largely investigated by literature over the last 50years, this topic still influences the research activity of many experts and practitioners, especially due to a series of studies which recently emphasized the closeness between theory and industrial practice. In this paper the scheduling problem of a hybrid flow shop with m stages, inspired to a truly observed micro-electronics manufacturing environment, has been investigated. Overlap between jobs of the same type, waiting time limit of jobs within inter-stage buffers as well as machine unavailability time intervals represent just a part of the constraints which characterize the problem here investigated. A mixed integer linear programming model of the problem in hand has been developed with the aim to validate the performance concerning the proposed optimization technique, based on a two-phase metaheuristics (MEs). In the first phase the proposed ME algorithm evolves similarly to a genetic algorithm equipped with a regular permutation encoding. Subsequently, since the permutation encoding is not able to investigate the overall space of solutions, a random search algorithm equipped with an m-stage permutation encoding is launched for improving the algorithm strength in terms of both exploration and exploitation. Extensive numerical studies on a benchmark of problems, along with a properly arranged ANOVA analysis, demonstrate the statistical outperformance of the proposed approach with respect to the traditional optimization approach based on a single encoding. Finally, a comprehensive comparative analysis involving the proposed algorithm and several metaheuristics developed by literature demonstrated the effectiveness of the dual encoding based approach for solving HFS scheduling problems.