Minimizing total travel time in the flexible job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources
Journal
European Journal of Operational Research
ISSN
03772217
Date Issued
2025
Author(s)
Abstract
Time-dependent manufacturing criteria, such as makespan or mean flow time, are commonly optimized in scheduling problems. Prioritizing these criteria is motivated by their correlation with key performance indicators, such as throughput and cycle time in flexible manufacturing systems. However, when transportation resources must also be explicitly managed, only optimizing manufacturing criteria may result in very poor schedules in terms of the distance traveled by the vehicles. This research aims to simultaneously optimize the makespan and the distance traveled by the vehicles, called total travel time, in the flexible job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. New generic neighborhood structures are proposed as well as an exact constant-time evaluation of the neighbor solutions in terms of total travel time. These findings are then used to introduce several optimization approaches in order to determine schedules that optimize both the makespan and the total travel time. The proposed approaches are experimentally tested on benchmark instances, and the numerical results are discussed, in particular the impact of the factory layout and the number of vehicles.
Subjects
Flexible job-shop scheduling
Neighborhood structures
Scheduling
Total travel time
Transportation resources
SDGs
Publisher
Elsevier B.V.
Type
journal article