Minimizing Idle Time of Selected Machines in Flowshop Problems

Scheduling in manufacturing systems involve allocation of resources spread over a time period to perform set of tasks.The problem of scheduling has been well researched in the past four decades considering the different situations of a manufacturing system. In this work the flow shop problem is considered with an objective of minimizing idle time of selected machines. Generally all the existing heuristics are developed to minimize the parameter like makespan time, flow time etc. In processing of jobs through machines, all machines are considered with equal importance. The first part of the research work made an attempt to improve the utilization of any one machine during processing. It can be achieved by reducing the idle time of the machine under consideration. The heuristic to be developed will improve the utilization of such selected machines. In order to validate the proposed heuristic, it is compared with the results of CDS method. The second part of the research work deal sequencing of jobs with priority is considered. It is assumed that among the available set of jobs few jobs will have priority and the remaining jobs are to be processed, after the processing priority jobs.