Preprocessing based Scheduling for Multi-Site Constraint Resources

Make-to-order manufacturers with multiple plants at multiple sites need to have the ability to quickly determine which plant will produce which customer order to meet the due date and minimize the transportation cost from the plants to the customer. Balancing the work loads and minimizing setups and make-span are also of great concern. Solving such scheduling problems usually takes a long time. We propose a new approach, which we call 'preprocessing', for resolving such complex problems. In preprocessing scheme, a 'good' a priori schedule is prepared and maintained using unconfirmed order information. Upon the confirmation of orders. the preprocessed schedule is quickly modified to obtain the final schedule. We present a preprocessing solution algorithm for multi-site constraint scheduling problem (MSCSP) using genetic algorithm; and conduct computational experiments to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.