Solving a multi-objective overlapping flow-shop scheduling

In flow-shop manufacturing scheduling systems, managers attempt to minimize makespan and manufacturing costs. Job overlaps are typically unavoidable in real-life applications as overlapping production shortens operation throughput times and reduces work-in-process inventories. This study presents an ant colony optimization (ACO) heuristic for establishing a simple and effective mechanism to solve the overlap manufacturing scheduling problem with various ready times and a sequentially dependent setup time. In the proposed approach, the scheduling mechanism and ACO heuristics are developed separately, thereby improving the performance of overlapping manufacturing flow by varying parameters or settings within the ACO heuristics and allowing for flexible application of manufacturing by altering scheduling criteria. Finally, the experimental results of the scheduling problem demonstrate that the ACO heuristics have good performance when searching for answers.