Title: Heuristic algorithms for scheduling a heat-treatment furnace of steel-casting foundry manufacturing

Authors: M. Ramasubramaniam; M. Mathirajan

Addresses: Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Loyola College Campus, Nungambakkam, Chennai – 600 054, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Faculty of Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India

Abstract: This paper addresses a new research problem of minimising makespan (C_max) on a batch processor (BP) with single job family (SJF), non-identical job sizes (NIJS), non-identical job dimensions (NIJD) and non-agreeable release times and due dates (NARD). We were led to this problem through a real-world application involving the scheduling of heat-treatment operations of steel casting foundry. The scheduling of furnace for heat-treatment of castings is of considerable interest as a large proportion of the total production time is the processing times of these operations. Due to the computational difficulty of the research problem, a few heuristic algorithms are proposed. In order to evaluate the solution quality of the proposed heuristic algorithms, a lower bound procedure is proposed. A series of computational experiments are conducted for absolute evaluation of heuristic algorithms in comparison with lower bound for large scale problems. This understanding facilitates the selection of the best algorithm under specific conditions for the research problem.

Keywords: batch processing; scheduling; mathematical modelling; lower bounds; heuristic algorithms; heat treatment furnaces; steel casting; foundries.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOM.2011.045459

International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, 2011 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.271 - 289

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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