Heuristics for production scheduling problem with machining and assembly operations

This work deals with production scheduling problem in an assembly flow shop, having parts machining followed by their subsequent assembly operations. Limited heuristics available on the problem, are based on unrealistic assumption that every part is processed on all machines. In this paper, two heuristics NEH_BB and Disjunctive are proposed to solve assembly flow shop scheduling problem where every part may not be processed on each machine. Exhaustive computational experiments are conducted with 60 trials each. The methods are found to be applicable to large size problems. The objective functions used for comparison are makespan and computational time. Disjunctive method takes very less computational time as compared to NEH_BB and hence claimed to be the better among available approaches for finding solution in assembly flow shop problems.