Title
A GRASP for simultaneously assigning and sequencing product families on flexible assembly lines.
Abstract
This paper introduces a new model and solution methodology for a real-world production scheduling problem arising in the electronics industry. The production environment is a high volume, just-in-time, make-to-order facility with volatile demand over many product families that are assembled on flexible lines. A distinguishing characteristic of the problem is the presence of non-traditional sequence-dependant setup costs, which complicate our ability to find high-quality solutions. The scheduling problem arose when product variety exceeded the mix that the existing lines could accommodate. A nonlinear integer programming formulation is presented for the problem of minimizing setup costs, and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is developed to find solutions. To select the GRASP parameter values, an efficient, space-filling experimental design method is used based on nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes. The proposed methodology is tested on actual factory data and compared to a prior heuristic presented in the literature; our heuristic provides a cost savings in 7 out of the 10 cases examined, and an average improvement of 17.39 % which is shown to be highly statistically significant. This improvement is due in part to the introduction of a pre-processing step to determine preferential and non-preferential line assignment information.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/s10479-012-1167-5
Annals OR
Keywords
Field
DocType
GRASP,Production sequencing,Nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes,Nonlinear integer programming
Heuristic,Mathematical optimization,Job shop scheduling,GRASP,Factory,Scheduling (production processes),Electronics,Greedy randomized adaptive search procedure,Hypercube,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
203
1
0254-5330
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
10
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Susan K. Heath1202.52
Jonathan F. Bard21428144.29
Douglas J. Morrice3538116.21