Job Shop Scheduling with Buffer Constraints and Jobs Consuming Variable Buffer Space

摘要

Job shop scheduling is among the most well studied problems in production planning. Yet, there is still a lack of comprehensive treatment of intermediate buffers. This paper deals with limited intermediate buffers with the important extension that not all jobs need to be handled in the same way regarding buffer space consumption. A heuristic to find feasible solutions is described and computational results are presented. While a reference procedure from literature devoted to case of unit buffer space consumption does not guarantee feasibility in all cases, the approach developed in this paper does. Moreover, it allows for variable space consumption, a feature which is new to literature paying better attention to more practical requirements than other models.