An optimization model for flexible routing based flowshop scheduling problem

The complication of quartz process leads to the difficulty of its production scheduling. This paper models the scheduling in quartz production as a flexible routing based flowshop scheduling problem with two objectives. Each job may have one or more process routes, i.e., a job operation may choose one equipment or skilled worker among a set of qualified ones with same function but perhaps with different processing speed or costs. The proposed model is a mixed-integer program: processing costs and tardiness charges. A dedicated Genetic Algorithm is designed with heuristics mechanism to solve the model. The simulated computation shows that the proposed model and the algorithm are feasible and effective for the flexible routing based flowshop scheduling problem.