A. Shtub et al., SCHEDULING PROGRAMS WITH REPETITIVE PROJECTS - A COMPARISON OF A SIMULATED ANNEALING, A GENETIC AND A PAIR-WISE SWAP ALGORITHM, European journal of operational research, 88(1), 1996, pp. 124-138
Citations number
20
Categorie Soggetti
Management,"Operatione Research & Management Science
We address the problem of scheduling in programs involving the product
ion of multiple units of the same product. Our study was motivated by
a construction program for fast naval patrol boats. Other applications
of this problem include procurement of multiple copies of aircraft, s
pacecraft, and weapon systems. In this problem we must decide how many
units of the product to assign to each of a number of available crews
(individuals, teams, subcontractors, etc.). These types of problems a
re characterized by two potentially conflicting considerations: 1) the
need to complete each unit by its contractual due date, and 2) learni
ng effects. Because of the first consideration, there is a tendency to
use multiple crews for simultaneous production, so that meeting due d
ates is assured. However, the second consideration encourages assignin
g many units to a single crew so that learning effects are maximized.
We study this scheduling problem with two different penalty cost struc
tures and develop models for both versions. The models trade-off the p
enalty associated with late deliveries and the savings due to learning
(and possibly incentive payments for early completion). We discuss di
fferent heuristic algorithms - simulated annealing, a genetic algorith
m, and a pair-wise swap heuristic - as well as an exhaustive search to
determine a baseline for comparisons. Our computational results show
that the pair-wise swap algorithm is the most efficient solution proce
dure for these models.