An Integrated Production and Transportation Scheduling Method in Hybrid Flow Shop

The connection between production scheduling and transportation scheduling is getting closer in smart manufacturing system, both of which are summarized as NP-hard problems. However, only a few studies have considered them simultaneously. This paper studies the integrated production and transportation scheduling problem (IPTSP) in hybrid flow shop, which is an extension of the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (HFSP). In this problem, the transfer tasks of jobs are performed by a certain number of automated guided vehicles (AGV). In addition to the production scheduling on machines, we consider the transportation scheduling on AGVs as the part of the optimization process. To solve it, we make some preparation (including the establishment of task pool, the new solution representation and the new solution evaluation), which can help algorithm efficiently find satisfactory solutions while appropriately limiting the search space. Then, an effective genetic tabu search algorithm is used to minimize the makespan. Finally, two groups of instances are designed and three types of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can achieve good results, showing the effectiveness of the presented approach.