An Unrelated Parallel Machines Model For Production Resetting Optimization

Efficient production resettings are necessary to achieve production flexibility. For this reason, most modern companies are trying to reduce the setup time required to switch the production from one product type to another. One way to minimize these times is to schedule correctly the various tasks involved during a production resetting: changing tools, modifying each machine settings, etc. In this paper, we present how this problem can be identified to an unrelated parallel machine problem with release dates and delivery times where the resources are operators. We show that the data structure allow to simplify the problem into an assignment problem even when we take into consideration the availability constraints of the operators. Moreover, we describe a branch-and-bound algorithm that we have used to solve this problem