Job Scheduling Problem in the Production of Electrical Equipment

Abstract

In this paper a real-life parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times of an industrial-type electrical equipment manufacturing company is addressed. The objective of this study is to find a solution method to achieve an effective and systematic schedule that minimizes the total weighted tardiness in the system by considering some properties related to the jobs and machines. These properties are the priority rank of jobs sequence-dependent setup times between jobs machine eligibility and machine availability. Initially a mathematical model is proposed for the problem. The solving performance of the proposed model by LINGO is tested with randomly generated toy problems. Since the problem has NP-hard characteristics heuristic algorithms based on the EDD rule and GTW algorithm are developed to obtain optimal or near-optimal schedules in an acceptable period of time. The success of the algorithms is tested through generated toy problems. It is observed that the combination of Modified EDD and HENOBA algorithms gives optimal or near-optimal solutions. Lastly an efficient and user-friendly decision support system (DSS) is created. © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.