This grant provides funding for the development of a unified framework to solve large-scale, practical scheduling and sequencing problems. The framework is inspired by PI's recent breakthrough in the solution of a sequencing problem. The framework to be developed will leverage the power of this new solution procedure in solving any general problem through a clever Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition scheme and column generation technique. The general scheduling problems under consideration involve jobs or operations to be performed on different manufacturing equipment (for example, flow shop and job shop). The scheduling objectives encompass a wide range of commonly used criteria such as makespan, total weighted completion time, total weighted tardiness, and total weighted earliness-tardiness. A series of computational experiments with four specific problems will be conducted.
The successful completion of this project will be sufficient to demonstrate the power of the proposed framework and stimulate broader interest among researchers and practitioners for follow-up research along this direction. It is expected that the research will contribute to the state of the art in scheduling and sequencing theory. More importantly, it will provide new algorithms for tackling large-scale, real-life problems. These research results will generate tools to improve daily scheduling decisions in manufacturing firms with complex scheduling issues.
