Optimized flowshop scheduling of multiple production lines for precast production

The current approach in practice to produce the flowshop schedules of precast production is the dispatching rule technique, which does not guarantee optimal schedules. Some researchers have developed models for a single production line to optimize the scheduling, in which Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to obtain the solution. However the models cannot be used for multiple production lines. Moreover, some optimization constraints and objectives were missing in the models, such as avoiding frequent type change of precast components during production. Both issues hinder their work to be applied to real precast plants. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes a Flowshop Scheduling Model of Multiple production lines for Precast production (MP-FSM) and develops a corresponding optimization approach to facilitate optimized scheduling by using GA. The approach was validated preliminarily by comparing with traditional scheduling approaches. The results demonstrated that optimized schedules can be obtained by using the proposed approach.