Modelling and solving a practical flexible job-shop scheduling problem with blocking constraints

This paper presents a study of a practical job-shop scheduling problem modelled and solved when helping a company to design a new production workshop. The main characteristics of the problem are that some resources are flexible, and blocking constraints have to be taken into account. The problem and the motivation for solving it are detailed. The modelling of the problem and the proposed resolution approach, a genetic algorithm, are described. Numerical experiments using real data are presented and analysed. We also show how these results were used to support choices in the design of the workshop.