Integrated Scheduling of Production and Material Delivery in a Make-to-order Flow Shop

With the growing demand for customization, many industries are changing from inventory-oriented mass production to make-to-order strategies to meet multi-variety and small-batch demands. Manufacturers build intelligent flexible flow shops using automated production equipment and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to organize production and material delivery. To meet the fast takt of the flow shop with multiple workstations for the production of multi-variety orders, it is critical for manufacturers to coordinate production and material delivery with limited AGV resources. This paper studies the integrated scheduling of production and material delivery problem motivated by our collaboration with an air conditioning compressor manufacturer by considering the features of the production of various types of products and heterogeneous material requirements by different products and workstations. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize the total production delay in the planning horizon. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed integrated scheduling method by comparing with two separate scheduling methods.