New Research Paper in the Journal “Operations Research Perspectives”: Customer order scheduling in a permutation flow shop environment

Julius Hoffmann, Janis Neufeld, and Udo Buscher investigate a challenging class of scheduling problems, where a customer order consists of multiple jobs and is only ready for shipment after the completion of the last job.

Novelty: Unlike previous literature, this process is not modelled within a parallel machine, but within a flow shop environment. To minimize the completion time of orders, both a Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) formulation and efficient variants of an Iterated Greedy Algorithm (IGA) were developed. These heuristic approaches yield excellent results with low computational time, making them practical for real-world applications.

Read more about our algorithms and findings:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214716025000387