Flow shop scheduling with synchronous material movement

Abstract

This study considers a new flow shop scheduling problem with a synchronous material movement. Specifically, we consider an automated machining center that consists of a loading/unloading station, two CNC machine stations, and a material handling device. The material handling device is a rotary table that moves parts between stations simultaneously. Given a set of jobs that need to be processed in the machining center, the objective of the problem is to find the sequence that minimizes the makespan. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimal sequence. The computational effort of the algorithm is also analyzed.