Flow shop scheduling with a batch processor and limited buffer

Abstract

This paper addresses flow shop scheduling problem with a batch processor followed by a discrete processor. Incompatible job families and limited buffer size are considered, and the objective is to determine a schedule such that the total completion time is minimised. Flexible buffer service policy is designed, and a greedy heuristic together with the worst-case analysis is developed. We also propose a hybrid method involving a Differential Evolution algorithm. Moreover, two tight lower bounds are provided to measure the performances of the proposed algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are capable of providing high-quality solutions for large-scale problems within a reasonable computational time.

Keywords:

• batch processor
• limited buffer
• flow shop
• total completion time
• differential evolution

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the constructive suggestions given by the referees.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation [grant number CMMI-1435800], [grant number CMMI-1536978]; National Science Foundation of China [grant number 71371015], [grant number 71690232].