Scheduling a hybrid flowshop with parallel machines for aircraft assembly production

摘要

The new P2/HFS|Prec|C_(max) scheduling problem is found within an aerospace fuselage manufacturing environment and is a combinatorial problem addressed using dispatching rules. A newly proposed dispatching rule, named 'batch and match', was created by exploiting the combined elements of a) product assembly characteristics and b) processing time on a shared resource, is used to find solutions for minimizing makespan and waiting time for ten fuselage sets. A new manufacturing tool incorporates models for calculation of makespan and waiting time in the system. The best schedule, found using the new dispatching rule and a weighting system for ranking makespan and waiting time, was DCAB (LI), this schedule gives a reduced makespan of 2.61% against the benchmark longest imminent operation rule. The DCAB (LI) schedule also shows a reduction in waiting time of 53.5% per fuselage set created. This 'batch and match' dispatching method performs better than other rules and offers a solution to shared resources that limit processing in hybrid flowshops with precedence constraints.