Minimizing total completion time in a two-machine flowshop with a learning effect [An article from: International Journal of Production Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from International Journal of Production Economics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In many situations, a worker's ability improves as a result of repeating the same or similar tasks; this phenomenon is known as the ''learning effect''. In this paper, the learning effect is considered in a two-machine flowshop. The objective is to find a sequence that minimizes the total completion time. Several dominance properties and the lower bounds are derived to speed up the elimination process of the branch-and-bound algorithm. A heuristic algorithm is also proposed to overcome the inefficiency of the branch-and-bound algorithm. In the simulation, the proposed heuristic algorithm is shown to perform consistently better than the previous one.