Production planning and scheduling in the glass container industry: A VNS approach

Inspired by a case study, this paper reports a successful application of VNS to the production planning and scheduling problem that arises in the glass container industry. This is a multi-facility production system, where each facility has a set of furnaces where the glass paste is produced in order to meet the demand, being afterwards distributed to a set of parallel molding machines. Since the neighborhoods used are not nested, they are not ordered by increasing sizes, but by means of a new empirical measure to assess the distance between any two solutions. Neighborhood sizes decrease significantly through-out the search thus suggesting the use of a scheme in which efficiency is placed. over effectiveness in a first step, and the opposite in a second step. We test this variant as well as other two with a real-world problem instance from our case study. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.