An exploratory study of a decomposition heuristic for complex shop scheduling with transportation

In this paper, we study the performance of an extension of the shifting bottleneck heuristic (SBH) for complex manufacturing systems that makes in addition to machine-related decisions also material handling-related decisions. We use the heuristic within a rolling horizon approach. We are interested in assessing the impact of the capacity of the material handling system, measured in number of available vehicles, on the performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm. Simulation experiments with models of manufacturing systems with processing conditions similar to those found in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (wafer fabs) are performed. It turns out that the capacity of the material handling system has an impact on the performance of the integrated scheduling heuristic.