Scheduling in Flexible Flow Shop Environments with Re-Entrant Jobs and Heterogeneous Workers
Abstract
In many industries, manufacturing is organized as a flexible flow shop (FFS), which has gotten the researchers' attention. The scheduling studies, particularly those on FFS scheduling, are concerned with homogeneous workers with the same skill set or heterogeneous workers who can only perform one specific type of operation on the production lines. Moreover, jobs are mainly assumed to go through an operation once. Yet, in real-life production, workers might have different skill sets with varying processing times. Furthermore, certain jobs may require revisiting the same machine multiple times, i.e., re-entrant jobs. We study an FFS environment with re-entrant jobs, considering worker flexibility. We propose a mixed integer linear programming model to find the optimal sequences of jobs to be processed by the multiskilled workers assigned to the production system, ensuring each re-entrant job waits for a predefined time window before reprocessing on the same operation. The objective of the model is to minimize makespan. We tested the proposed model on a dataset taken from a real production system of a PVC windows and doors production facility
Keywords
References
- Bekli, S., & Kayisoglu, B. (2025). Scheduling in flexible flow shop environments with re-entrant jobs and heterogeneous workers. The Eurasia Proceedings of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (EPSTEM), 35, 314-322.
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Statistics (Other)
Journal Section
Conference Paper
Early Pub Date
October 20, 2025
Publication Date
September 30, 2025
Submission Date
May 6, 2025
Acceptance Date
June 10, 2025
Published in Issue
Year 2025 Volume: 35