An Application On Flowshop Scheduling

Flow shop scheduling problem has been well known as a research field for fifty years. In recent years, researchers have suggested many heuristic procedures to solve this type of problems. Most of these proposed algorithms in flow shop literature were applied to the benchmark problems. Few studies in flow shop literature include a real production application. The aim of this paper is to apply scheduling activity in a real flow shop production line. A cable production line is choosen for the application. All of the jobs are processed with same order which is named as permutational environment. The production line which is composed of eight different machines produces twelve kinds of cable. In other words, the problem size is 12 jobs x 8 machines. The objective of this problem focuses on minimizing total completion time and makespan. An ant colony algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. By changing initial solution of the algorithm, effect on objective function was monitored.