The role of work-in-process inventory in serial production lines
Operations Research
An algorithm for solving the job-shop problem
Management Science
A fast taboo search algorithm for the job shop problem
Management Science
Buffer allocation in unreliable production lines using a knowledge based system
Computers and Operations Research
An effective hybrid DE-based algorithm for multi-objective flow shop scheduling with limited buffers
Computers and Operations Research
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A double relaxation GRASP algorithm to solve the flow-shop scheduling problem
ISC '07 Proceedings of the 10th IASTED International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Control
Scheduling flow lines with buffers by ant colony digraph
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
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The work described in this paper attempts to validate the implicit assumption in traditional flow shop scheduling research that there is a buffer of infinite capacity between any two adjacent machines. The modified NEH (Nawaz, Encore and Ham) algorithm is used to generate an initial permutation schedule which is then improved by tabu search. For any given sequence, a limited equal buffer size is considered in computing job completion times. The scheduling objective is to minimize mean job flowtime. Computational results and analysis are presented. Through these simulation experiments, it was found that the improvement by tabu search can be significant and there is no need for more than 4 buffer spaces between any two adjacent machines. Future research directions are also discussed.