Production Scheduling with History-Dependent Setup Times

Abstract

We consider a parallel-machine scheduling problem with jobs that require setups. The duration of a setup does not depend only on the job just completed but on a number of preceding jobs. These setup times are referred to as history-dependent. Such a scheduling problem is often encountered in the food processing industry as well as in other process industries. In our model, we consider two types of setup times-a regular setup time and a major setup time that becomes necessary after several "hard-to-clean" jobs have been processed on the same machine. We consider multiple objectives, including facility utilization, flexibility, number of major setups, and tardiness. We solve several special cases assuming predetermined job sequences and propose strongly polynomial time algorithms to determine the optimal timing of the major setups for given job sequences. We also extend our analysis to develop pseudopolynomial time algorithms for cases with additional objectives, including the total weighted completion time, the total weighted tardiness, and the weighted number of tardy jobs. (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 59: 58-68, 2012