Scheduling a single machine to maintain a dynamic WIP profile in coordinated manufacturing chains.

This article addresses the problem of selecting and scheduling several jobs on a single machine to sustain the desired dynamic work-in-process profile. We consider sequence-dependent setup times between jobs and strictly enforced time window constraints on the start time of each job. We use working shift production targets to coordinate decentralized local schedulers and make them inline with the manufacturing chain goals. Based on the discretization of scheduling time horizon, we propose a two-step mixed-integer programming model and a new network-based heuristic. The primary objective of these approaches is to maximize the total defined score for jobs while satisfying production targets. The secondary objective is to minimize the maximum completion time of all selected jobs. The effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed algorithms are analyzed and compared with two existing approaches over a wide range of simulated scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]