Abstract
This paper is concerned with a batching problem encountered in the context of production smoothing in just-in-time manufacturing systems. The manufacturing system of interest is a multi-level system with a flow-shop at the final level. We develop a hybrid meta-heuristic method to solve the batching problem, which is known to be NP-hard. We hybridize strategic oscillation (SO) and path re-linking (PR) methods and compare the hybrid method's performance to two benchmark methods: a bounded dynamic programming method developed for the problem earlier and an implementation of robust tabu search (RTS) meta-heuristic. Through a computational study, we show that the proposed hybrid method is effective in solving the problem within several minutes of computer time and yielding near-optimal results.
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Yavuz, M., Akcali, E. & Tufekci, S. A Hybrid Meta-Heuristic for the Batching Problem in Just-In-Time Flow Shops. J Math Model Algor 5, 371–393 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10852-005-9035-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10852-005-9035-9
Key words
- production smoothing
- just-in-time manufacturing
- meta-heuristics
- tabu search
- strategic oscillation
- path relinking