Transformation of Job Shop to Flow Shop in an Era of Global Crises

The differentiation of products and services parallel with the globalization, motivated researchers to commit resources within supply chains more effectively. Competitive nature of the markets requires innovativeness with swift actions to supply mass customized demand. The total cost in the supply chain has to be minimized, thus efficient allocation and collaboration of tasks with a detailed scheduling is a must. Job shop scheduling problem with its NP-hard feature has been one of the major problems in the operational research area for a long time. Global crises call for a transformation of the unsettled traditional production systems which generally follow job shop schemes -although in general they serve as flow shops where the process within always follow the same order. Flow shops are preferable to job shops because the structure allows for less material handling and more control over the floor. In this paper, job shop and flow shop scheduling problems are discussed through a case study held in a wooden furniture job shop. Results that focus on minimization of completion, makespan and waiting time are obtained using Excel's Solver toolbox with an embedded evolutionary algorithm