Among the different tasks in production logistics, job scheduling is one of the most important at the operational decision-making level to enable organizations to achieve competiveness. Scheduling consists in the allocation of limited resources to activities over time in order to achieve one or more optimization objectives. Flow-shop (FS) scheduling problems encompass the sequencing processes in environments in which the activities or operations are performed in a serial flow. This type of configuration includes assembly lines and the chemical, electronic, food, and metallurgical industries, among others. Scheduling has been mostly investigated for the deterministic cases, in which all parameters are known in advance and do not vary over time. Nevertheless, in real-world situations, events are frequently subject to uncertainties that can affect the decision-making process. Thus, it is important to study scheduling and sequencing activities under uncertainties since they can cause infeasibilities and disturbances. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of the FS scheduling problem under uncertainties and its role in production logistics and to draw up opportunities for further research. To this end, 100 papers about FS and flexible flow-shop scheduling problems published from 2001 to October 2016 were analyzed and classified. Trends in the reviewed literature are presented and finally some research opportunities in the field are proposed.

This paper deals with Flow-shop Sequence-Dependent Group Scheduling and worker assignment problem. Flow-shop allows the process of a set of families of products applying the group technology concept to reduce setup costs, lead times, and work-in-process inventory costs. The worker assignment problem deals with assigning workers to workstations considering their different abilities and learning effect. The proposed model in this paper considers different objectives. The decision problems in this cellular manufacturing system are the jobs scheduling within of own group, the group scheduling and the workers assignment to the machines. The aim of this paper is to consider a more realistic profile of heterogeneous workers introducing the learning effect in the joint group scheduling and workers assignment problem. A mathematical model and an evolutionary procedure has been developed to solve this problem. A benchmark of test cases having different numbers of machines, groups, jobs, worker skills and learning index, has been taken into account to compare the efficiency of the proposed algorithm with two well known procedures.

In this paper, we introduce a unified mathematical formulation for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) and for the Capacitated Location Routing Problem (CLRP), adopting radiality constraints in order to guarantee valid routes and eliminate subtours. This idea is inspired by formulations already employed in electric power distribution networks, which requires a radial topology in its operation. The results show that the proposed formulation greatly improves the convergence of the solver.

This paper presents a joint economic lot size model for a single manufacturer-a single buyer. The purposed model involves the greenhouse gas emission from industrial and transport sectors. We divide the emission into two types, namely the direct and indirect emissions. In this paper, we consider the Government’s penalty and incentive policies to reduce the emission. We assume that the demand of the buyer is normally distributed and partially backordered. The objective is to minimize joint total cost incurred by a single manufacturer-a single buyer and involves the transportation costs of the freight forwarder. Transportation costs are the function of shipping weight, distance, fuel price and consumption with two transportation modes: truckload and less-than-truckload shipments. Finally, an algorithm procedure is proposed to determine the optimal order quantity, safety factor, actual shipping weight, total emission and frequency of deliveries. Numerical examples and analyses are given to illustrate the results.

Manufacturing systems need to be able to work under the dynamic and uncertain production environment. Machine and routing flexibility combined with preventive maintenance actions can improve the performance of the manufacturing systems under dynamic conditions. This paper evaluates different levels of machine and routing flexibility combined with different degrees of preventive maintenance policy. The performance measures considered are throughput, work in process and throughput. The performance measures are compared with a system without any flexibility and no preventive maintenance actions. Different levels of flexibility and preventive maintenance actions are examined under a simulation environment. The simulation results highlight more important factors for the performance measures and the best combination of the factors to improve the performance.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of factors such as cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut on surface roughness and Material Removed Rate (MRR) when machining in dry face milling AISI 1040 steel with coated carbide inserts GC1030 using the response surface methodology (RSM). For this purpose, a number of machining experiments based on statistical three-factor and three-level factorial experiment designs, completed (L27) with a statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA), were performed in order to develop mathematical models and to identify the significant factors of these technological parameters. Multi-objective optimization procedure for minimizing Ra, Ry and Rz and maximizing MRR using desirability approach has been also implementented. The current study was also carried out to investigate the tool life of the inserts. The models found the relationship between the cutting parameters (Vc, fz and ap) and the studied technological parameters. It has been found that the cutting speed was the most affecting surface roughness which is due to the geometry of the insert which has a scraping edge and enables to obtain low roughness even at important feed rate, followed by the feed rate and the depth of cut at the end. The optimal combination of cutting parameters were cutting speed of 314 m/min, feed rate of 0.16 mm/tooth and depth of cut of 0.6 mm with a composite desirability of 0.924.