This paper addresses the single-machine scheduling problem with release times minimizing the total completion time. Under the circumstance of incomplete global information at each decision time, a two-level rolling scheduling strategy (TRSS) is presented to create the global schedule step by step. The estimated global schedules are established based on a dummy schedule of unknown jobs. The first level is the preliminary scheduling based on the predictive window and the second level is the local scheduling for sub-problems based on the rolling window. Performance analysis demonstrates that TRSS can improve the global schedules. Computational results show that the solution quality of TRSS outperforms that of the existing rolling procedure in most cases.
There are many flow shop problems of throughput (denoted by FSPT) with constraints of due date in real production planning and scheduling. In this paper, a decomposition and coordination algorithm is proposed based on the analysis of FSPT and under the support of TOC (theory of constraint). A flow shop is at first decomposed into two subsystems named PULL and PUSH by means of bottleneck. Then the subsystem is decomposed into single machine scheduling problems,so the original NP-HARD problem can be transferred into a serial of single machine optimization problems finally. This method reduces the computational complexity, and has been used in a real project successfully.
A new bottleneck-based heuristic for large-scale flow-shop scheduling problems with a bottleneck is proposed, which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck （SB） procedure. In this algorithm, a schedule for the bottleneck machine is first constructed optimally and then the non-bottleneck machines are scheduled around the bottleneck schedule by some effective dispatching rules. Computational results show that the modified bottleneck-based procedure can achieve a tradeoff between solution quality and computational time comparing with SB procedure for medium-size problems. Furthermore it can obtain a good solution in quite short time for large-scale scheduling problems.
