Author(s)

Patrick R. McMullen

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This research presents a problem relevant to production scheduling for mixed models – production schedules that contain several unique items, but each unique item may have multiple units that require processing. The presented research details a variant of this problem where, over multiple processes, resequencing is permitted to a small degree so as to exploit efficiencies with the intent of optimizing the objectives of required set-ups and parts usage rate via an efficient frontier. The problem is combinatorial in nature. Enumeration is used on a variety of test problems from the literature, and a search heuristic is used to compare optimal solutions with heuristic based solutions. Experimentation shows that the heuristic solutions approach optimality, but with opportunities for improvement.

Sequencing, Heuristics, Simulated Annealing

P. McMullen, "Limited Resequencing for Mixed Models with Multiple Objectives," American Journal of Operations Research, Vol. 1 No. 4, 2011, pp. 220-228. doi: 10.4236/ajor.2011.14025.