Abstract
This paper considers scheduling in a multi-stage flow shop where the final stage is the "assembly station" as studied by M.Yokoyama in 1996 and 1997. Several "parts" are processed in the earlier stages and assembled into a product. We assume a so-called lot-streaming environment which allows partitioning of a lot into a number of equally-sized "sublots", and we try to construct a schedule which smoothes out the completion times of individual products. An enumerative algorithm is presented to solve the problem, and is evaluated via computational experiments. The proposed algorithm can solve problems with less than 8 different part types. The original algorithm works well when the lot can be divided into equally-sized sublots in several different ways; that is, considering the fact that the algorithm only works well when lot size D has a reasonable number of divisors, two variants of the approach are also presented which are applicable to cases where lot size D has only a few divisors. The second variant is shown experimentally to produce good results within reasonable computing time.
