Abstract
In this paper, a dry kiln scheduling problem from the furniture manufacturing industry is considered. Factory-specified due dates for orders, kiln availability, kiln capacity, and travel time from the kilns to the factories are all incorporated in a model which is formulated as an integer linear program. The objective of the formulation is to minimize the maximum tardiness of orders arriving at the plants by solving a special case of scheduling n independent jobs on m non-identical parallel machines. Because of the computational complexity, and the fact that standard integer programming packages appear to perform very poorly on the problem, a heuristic approach is developed. Computational experience is provided which indicates that the heuristic gives very high quality solutions to problems in near real-time.
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Yaghubian, A.R., Hodgson, T.J., Joines, J.A. et al. Dry kiln scheduling in furniture production. IIE Transactions 31, 733–738 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007602127881
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007602127881