A decomposition-based approach to flexible flow shop scheduling under machine breakdown

Abstract

Manufacturing systems in real-world production are generally dynamic and often subject to a wide range of uncertainties. Recently, research on production scheduling under uncertainty has attracted substantial attention. Although some methods have been developed to address this problem, scheduling under uncertainty remains inherently difficult to solve by any single approach. This article considers makespan optimisation of a flexible flow shop (FFS) scheduling problem under machine breakdown. It proposes a novel decomposition-based approach to decompose an FFS scheduling problem into several cluster scheduling problems which can be solved more easily by different approaches. A neighbouring K-means clustering algorithm is developed to first group the machines of an FFS into an appropriate number of machine clusters, based on a proposed machine allocation algorithm and weighted cluster validity indices. Two optimal back propagation networks, corresponding to the scenarios of simultaneous and non-simultaneous job arrivals, are then selectively adopted to assign either the shortest processing time (SPT) or the genetic algorithm (GA) to each machine cluster to solve cluster scheduling problems. If two neighbouring machine clusters are allocated with the same approach, they are subsequently merged. After machine grouping and approach assignment, an overall schedule is generated by integrating the solutions to the sub-problems. Computation results reveal that the proposed approach is superior to SPT and GA alone for FFS scheduling under machine breakdown.