Title: Analysis of linkage network of queues with a multi stage flowshop scheduling system

Authors: Seema Sharma; Deepak Gupta; Sameer Sharma

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, D.A.V. College, Jalandhar City, 144008 Punjab, India ' Department of Mathematics, M.M. University, Mullana, Ambala, 133207 Haryana, India ' Department of Mathematics, D.A.V. College, Jalandhar City, 144008 Punjab, India

Abstract: In today's information age society, where activities are highly interdependent and intertwined, sharing of resources and hence waiting in queues is a common phenomenon that occurs in every facet of our lives. Flowshop scheduling with an objective of minimising the makespan is also an important task in manufacturing system. The present paper is an attempt to establish a linkage network of queues consisting of a biserial server and two parallel servers linked to a common server in series with a multistage flow shop scheduling system. The arrival and service pattern follow Poisson law. The completion time of jobs/customers in queue network (phase I of the service) will be the setup time for first machine in flowshop system having 'm' machines in series (phase II of the service). A heuristic approach to find optimal or near optimal sequence of jobs processing minimising the total elapsed time with minimum waiting time has been discussed for the queuing-scheduling linkage model. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by a numerical illustration.

Keywords: biserial servers; parallel servers; mean queuing length; linkage networks; processing time; makespan; service time; completion time; average waiting time; multistage scheduling; flow shop scheduling; resource sharing; sequencing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2014.065612

International Journal of Operational Research, 2014 Vol.21 No.4, pp.409 - 432

Received: 16 Sep 2012
Accepted: 02 Mar 2013
Published online: 25 Nov 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article