A cutting and scheduling problem in float glass manufacturing

  • Authors:

  • Byungsoo Na;Shabbir Ahmed;George Nemhauser;Joel Sokol

  • Affiliations:

  • H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA 30332;H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA 30332;H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA 30332;H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA 30332

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Scheduling
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

This paper considers a cutting and scheduling problem of minimizing scrap motivated by float glass manufacturing and introduces the float glass scheduling problem. We relate it to classical problems in the scheduling literature such as no-wait hybrid flow shops and cyclic scheduling. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and identify when each of the problem's components are polynomially solvable and when they induce hardness. In addition, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm, provide its worst-case performance bounds, and demonstrate that the bounds are tight. When the number of machines is two, the worst-case performance is 5/3.