Scheduling of corrugated paper production

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2007.10.019 Byline: Kazuki Matsumoto (a), Hiroyoshi Miwa (b), Toshihide Ibaraki (b) Keywords: Scheduling; Corrugated paper; Complexity; Contiguous set; Integer programming Abstract: Corrugated paper is produced by gluing three types of papers of the same breadth. Given a set of orders, we first assign each order to one of the standard breadths, and then sequence those assigned to each standard breadth so that they are continuously manufactured from the three rolls of the specified standard breadth equipped in the machine called corrugator. Here we are asked to achieve multi-goals of minimizing total length of roll papers, total loss of papers caused by the differences between standard breadths and real breadths of the orders, and the number of machine stops needed during production. We use integer programming to assign orders to standard breadths, and then develop a special purpose algorithm to sequence the orders assigned to each standard breadth. This is a first attempt to handle scheduling problems of the corrugator machine. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan (b) Department of Informatics, School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University, 2-1 Gakuen Sanda, Hyogo 669-1337, Japan Article History: Received 24 March 2007; Accepted 5 October 2007