SCHEDULING OF PRODUCTS WITH COMMON AND PRODUCT-DEPENDENT COMPONENTS MANUFACTURED AT A SINGLE FACILITY

This paper analyses a scheduling problem concerned with the production of components at a single manufacturing facility where the manufactur ed components are subsequently assembled into a finite number of end p roducts. Each product is composed of a common component and a product- dependent component, and completion time of a product is determined by the completion time of the last of two components. All the components are manufactured in a batch process at the single facility and, durin g the batch process, the manufactured components are individually move d to the next (assembly) station; switching from production of product -dependent components to common components only incurs a set-up cost. The solution properties are characterized subject to the mean flow tim e measure, based upon which an efficient branch-and-bound solution alg orithm is exploited.