Zone and resource scheduling in remanufacturing systems

In remanufacturing projects, work space constraints can limit the simultaneous processing of any pair of jobs requiring the same physical location and often force stronger limitations on the project schedule than precedence constraints. This paper introduces a new priority heuristic rule where the impact of work space constraints is measured in terms of the total minimum remaining project duration. This measure is used to determine the resource allocation at every scheduling decision time point based on the currently active precedence and work space constraints imposed on the schedulable activities. Our experimental results based on a set of 15 real remanufacturing projects shows that the proposed procedure performs better than well reputed heuristic rules.