Managing Disruptions in a Flow-Shop Manufacturing System

Abstract

There is a manufacturing system where several parts are processed through machining workstations and later assembled to form final products. In the event of disruptions such as machine failure, the original flow-shop schedule needs to be revised and/or rescheduled. In such a scenario, rescheduling methods based on right-shift rescheduling and affected operations rescheduling work very well. Here in this study, the deviation of the make-span of the revised schedule from the original schedule is used as a performance measure. We have proposed three rescheduling methods. There are multiple factors that influence the performance of the rescheduling methodology. One of them is the make-span deviation of the schedule, and the factors influencing it are optimality of the initial solution, failure duration, deviation of make-span, rescheduling method, size, and instant of failure. The initial schedule and problem size depend on the flow-shop manufacturing system for which scheduling is performed, but the method of rescheduling depends on the decision as to which rescheduling methodology is to be selected. Computations are performed using full factorial experimentation. We also observed that right-shift rescheduling is the preferred rescheduling method in the majority of situations. In contrast, the affected operation rescheduling method is also equally suitable when the initial solution is created using modified bottleneck minimum idleness.