Two-stage scheduling in shelf-board production: A case study

In this paper, we consider a production planning problem arising at a company assembling shelf boards for kitchen elements. Different products have to be produced on circular production units with a synchronous transportation system, which leads to sequence-dependent production times. Additionally, changeover times occur due to changes of resources. The objective is to find a production schedule of given orders such that the number of late orders is minimised. We propose a hierarchical approach which is split into a coarse and a fine planning stage. While the coarse planning problem is solved as a network flow problem, the fine planning is done by an asynchronous team (A-team) approach. Finally, some computational results for real-world data are presented.