Scheduling optimisation of a real flexible job shop including fixture availability and preventive maintenance

The multitask cell at GKN Aerospace Sweden is a flexible job shop containing ten resources aimed at being flexible with regard to product mix and processing types. We present a time-indexed formulation of the problem of optimally scheduling the planned jobs on the resources, also considering a limited availability of fixtures as well as required preventive maintenance activities. The objective is to minimise a weighted sum of the completion times and tardiness for the jobs, where the tardiness weight for a given job is a non-increasing function of its due date. We propose a fast iterative approach to finding a suitable value of the length of the time horizon that needs to be set for the time-indexed formulation and which considerably influences the computation time. Computational results show that the method developed is able to produce optimal, or near-optimal, schedules for real data instances within an acceptable practical time frame. [Received 1 October 2012; Revised 13 May 2013; Accepted 20 September 2013]