Innovative production scheduling with customer satisfaction based measurement for the sustainability of manufacturing firms

Abstract

Scheduling problems for the sustainability of manufacturing firms in the era of the fourth industrial revolution is addressed in this research. In terms of open innovation, innovative production scheduling can be defined as scheduling using big data, cyber-physical systems, internet of things, cloud computing, mobile network, and so on. In this environment, one of the most important things is to develop an innovative scheduling algorithm for the sustainability of manufacturing firms. In this research, a flexible flowshop scheduling problem is considered with the properties of sequence-dependent setup and different process plans for jobs. In a flexible flowshop, there are serial workstations with multiple pieces of equipment that are able to process multiple lots simultaneously. Since the scheduling in this workshop is known to be extremely difficult, it is important to devise an efficient and effective scheduling algorithm. In this research, a heuristic algorithm is proposed based on a few dispatching rules and economic lot size model with the objective of minimizing total tardiness of orders. For the purposes of performance evaluation, a simulation study is conducted on randomly generated problem instances. The results imply that our proposed method outperforms the existing ones, and greatly enhances the sustainability of manufacturing firms.