The 2-stage Assembly Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Today, manufacturing systems face new global challenges that require flexibility and quick reactions. To remain competitive, companies must also focus on the minimisation of time, as it leads to cost reductions, shorter delivery times, and a more agile and flexible response. In this context, improving the scheduling is of great importance. This is why, in this doctoral thesis, different ways to improve the scheduling of the considered problem are discussed in this thesis. More specifically, we address the 2-stage assembly scheduling problem. This problem consists of two stages: the components of the product are processed in the first stage and then assembled in the second stage. In the first stage, we consider dedicated parallel machines and, in the second stage, one or several parallel assembly machines. The purpose of this thesis is to make several contributions in different aspects of the problem. First, we review in detail the problem under consideration. Second, there are some less studied variants of the problem that remain unanalysed and are considered in this thesis. Furthermore, there is no a common set of instances in which the different optimization methods developed to solve the problem can be evaluated and compared. Finally, additional constraints are also considered for the 2-stage assembly scheduling problem, as they have never been addressed.