COMPUTER-ASSISTED MULTIITEM, MULTIMACHINE AND MULTISITE SCHEDULING INA HARDWOOD FLOORING FACTORY

Within this paper, we consider the problem of supporting the schedulin g of a set of lumber drying kilns as to meet the demand generated by t he production plan of a hardwood factory, while avoiding stockouts. Th e computer-based coordination of the kiln-drying activities within the global hardwood flooring production process is first presented. Then, we focus on the kiln drying activities and develop a heuristic to sch edule kilns in a multi-item, multi-machine and multi-site production e nvironment, with the objective of keeping inventories low while meetin g demand and avoiding stockouts. An overview of KilnOpt, an object-ori ented software environment to implement the scheduling heuristic is pr esented in the last section of the paper. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.