CYCLIC SCHEDULING OF A HOIST WITH TIME WINDOW CONSTRAINTS

This paper proposes a model and a related algorithm for generating opt imal cyclic schedules of hoist moves with time window constraints in a printed circuit board (PCB) electroplating facility. The algorithm is based on the branch and bound approach and requires the solution of a specific class of linear programming problems (LPP's), These LPP's ar e equivalent to the problems of the cycle time evaluation in bi-valued graphs, Computational experience is presented to compare the results obtained using this new algorithm with the ones proposed in the litera ture.