An advanced model for solving industrial scheduling problems

This paper summarizes an advanced model and a practiceoriented approach to solve scheduling problems of discrete manufacturing systems. An advanced scheduling approach is presented which is able to adapt to the requirements of real-life situations by taking into consideration the specific characteristics of modern manufacturing and assembly systems. These detailed constraints and capabilities of the actual resource environment include the alternative technological routes, the limited available machines, the unrelated processing time, the sequence dependent setup time and the jobs with due dates. An extended flexible job shop scheduling model is defined to solve the resource allocation problems and to create the fine schedule of the execution of jobs, tasks and operations. The paper describes the most important characteristics of the analyzed problem class and shows the main approach of the developed heuristic solving method. Our approach combines a special searching technique based on fast execution-driven simulation with a multi-objective optimization model.