Exact and approximate methods to solve the Open Shop scheduling problem with explicit sequence-dependent setup times

Abstract

Several studies have been carried out regarding the optimization of production scheduling in industrial environments. New variants, related to several problems, have been incorporated to this study area in order to cover the most diverse cases presented in productive area. Within this context, the project aims to study a problem of production scheduling little highlighted in the literature, the open shop scheduling problem. In this study, an important restriction will be observed for the system portrayed: the consideration of explicit setup times, depending on the operations sequence and machines. The objective is to find solutions that minimize some indicator about scheduling quality, such as makespan, flowtime and tardness. For modeling and solving the problem, heuristics and bio-inspired metaheuristics methods will be used as aproximative methods and mathematical programming methods, such as integer linear programming and constraint programming models will be used as exact methods. A case study will be proposed with data collected from a pharmaceutical industry. The results will be compared with the scheduling methods currently used by the company. In addition, for benchmarking, the methods will be run with robust data from classical instances of literature adapted to the constraints of the problem under consideration. (AU)