A New Variant of the Distributed Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Worker Flexibility

This paper studies for the first time a new variant of the Distributed Flow Shop named Distributed Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with worker flexibility (DPFSPw). The DPFSPw is a type of distributed production systems in which the production tasks are first assigned to different factories, then, the sequencing of the workers and jobs on machines will be executed. The optimization criterion is the minimization of the maximum completion time or makespan among the factories regarding the availability of the workers on machines. Motivated by the good performances of some heuristics in the literature, we present a constructive heuristic to deal with the DPFSPw. This paper highlights the need to study human factors introduced into the DPFSP that will lead to more realistic insights to enhance the precision and usefulness of operations scheduling models.

Automated summary

This paper studies a new variant of the Distributed Flow Shop called Distributed Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with worker flexibility (DPFSPw) and presents a constructive heuristic algorithm. The authors emphasize the importance of incorporating human factors into distributed production systems to improve the accuracy and usefulness of operations scheduling models.