A heuristic for priority-based scheduling in a turbine manufacturing job-shop

Abstract

The increasing importance of make-to-order manufacturing, inventory reduction and resource optimisation have placed further emphasis on the growing role of scheduling in the current global business environment. Often there has been a problem of applying the mathematically rich concepts of scheduling theory to solve the real-time industrial problems – in particular the problem of job-shop scheduling. In this context, in our current work, we develop a priority-based heuristic for minimising the makespan for a turbine manufacturing industry. This heuristic gives the optimal schedule based on the dynamic priorities of the customer work orders. We also propose bounds for makespan in job-shop scheduling environment. There are a host of issues addressed by the job shop scheduling system, like resource break-down, reentrance of the jobs on the resources that are already visited by the job. Our research helps in connecting the academic theory with real-time industrial scheduling problem to get better quality results.