Title: Solving the response time variability problem by means of the cross-entropy method

Authors: Alberto Garcia-Villoria, Albert Corominas, Rafael Pastor

Addresses: Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. ' Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. ' Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: The response time variability problem (RTVP) is an NP-hard combinatorial scheduling problem that has recently appeared in the literature. The RTVP has a wide range of production line systems applications such as sequencing the models to be produced on a mixed-model assembly line in a just-in-time context. This problem occurs whenever several units of different models need to be sequenced so as to minimise the variability of the distance between any two consecutive units of the same model. A mathematical mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model has been presented by another study, but the practical limit for obtaining optimal solutions is around 40 units to be scheduled. Another study has developed five heuristic algorithms to solve non-small RTVP instances. We propose to solve the RTVP by means of the metaheuristic cross-entropy (CE) method, which has been developed recently. We report on the computational experiments in which the CE method is compared with the five heuristic algorithms proposed in the literature.

Keywords: response time variability; RTVP; fair sequences; mixed-model assembly lines; production lines; just-in-time; JIT production; scheduling; cross-entropy; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2010.032904

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2010 Vol.20 No.1/2/3/4, pp.316 - 330

Published online: 05 May 2010 *

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