A flow shop sequencing problem with synchronous material transfers

Abstract

We consider a machining center that consists of a loading/unloading station, a CNC machine station, and a rotary table, which is the material handling device that moves jobs between these two stations simultaneously. Given a set of jobs that need to be processed on the machining center, the objective of the problem is to find the job sequence that minimizes the makespan. In this paper, a 0-1 mixed-integer linear programming model for this problem is presented. In addition, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to obtain near-optimal solutions for large-scale versions of the problem. Computational results are also provided.