We establish the computational complexity of the problem of minimizing makespan in a flowshop, where each jobs requires a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense for m =2...

We study the problem of scheduling a chain-reentrant shop, in which each job goes for its processing first to a machine called the primary machine, then to a number of other machines in a fixed sequence, and finally back to the primary machine for its last operation. The problem is to schedule...

In many applications, robotic cells are used in repetitive production of identical parts. A robotic cell contains two or more robot-served machines. The robot can have single or dual gripper. The cycle time is the time to produce a part in the cell. We consider single part-type problems. Since...

In this paper, we deal with the problem of sequencing parts and robot moves in a robotic cell where the robot is used to feed machines in the cell. The robotic cell, which produces a set of parts of the same or different types, is a flow-line manufacturing system. Our objective is to maximize...

A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has...

A robotic cell - manufacturing system widely used in industry - contains two or more robot-served machines, repetitively producing a number of part types. In this paper, we consider scheduling of operations in a bufferless dual-gripper robotic cell processing multiple part types. The processing...

We discuss the performance of scheduling algorithms for a certain kind of manufacturing environment, called the "Flexible Flowshop", which consists of a certain number of machine centers. Each center has one or more identical parallel machines. Each part is processed by at most one machine in...

A job-shop with two machine centers with the second one consisting of k parallel machines is considered. An approximate algorithm for minimizing schedule length in the job shop with unit time operations in the first machine center and k time-units operations in the second is proposed. The...

Scheduling methods are proposed for a class of flexible manufacturing systems consisting of machine centers served by a cyclic conveyor. The minimization of finish time is considered as the optimization criterion. An optimal algorithm is proposed for the minimum conveyor speed (S = 1) for a...

We develop a genetic algorithm (GA) for a real-life problem of scheduling of the golf-club-head injection process performed on a set of parallel machines. In our study, the orders for club heads are usually requested by sets with certain due dates and can be shipped only if they are complete....