Abstract
Due to a large amount of the retirement of experienced personnel, it is one of the most serious issues how the technical predominance of manufacturing industries, such as iron and steel industries in Japan, can be maintained. Here, from the viewpoint of problem-solving by experienced personnel, the acquisition and the utilization of some additional and essential information might be crucial. According to this observation, in the paper, a kind of scheduling problems, i.e., a scheduling problem of the flexible flow shop type with uncertainty in set-up operations, is taken as an example of the problem-solving in manufacturing industries. Then, a mathematical programming-based approach is investigated, where two kinds of optimization models are formulated: One is the model of the solution by unskillful personnel in which only the normal (or common) data is used, whereas the other is the solution model by experienced personnel in which some additional information is available. Furthermore, through some computational examples for the simplified scheduling problem of the flexible flow shop type, the potential of the experienced personnel model, i.e., the robustness of the obtained schedule for uncertain situations, has been confirmed.
