Heuristic algorithms for scheduling heat-treatment furnaces of steel casting industries

Mathirajan, M and Chandru, V and Sivakumar, AI (2007) Heuristic algorithms for scheduling heat-treatment furnaces of steel casting industries. In: Sadhana, 32 (5). pp. 479-500.

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Abstract

This paper addresses a research problem of scheduling parallel, nonidentical batch processors in the presence of dynamic job arrivals, incompatible job-families and non-identical job sizes.We were led to this problem through a realworld application involving the scheduling of heat-treatment operations of steel casting. The scheduling of furnaces for heat-treatment of castings is of considerable interest as a large proportion of the total production time is the processing times of these operations. In view of the computational intractability of this type of problem, a few heuristic algorithms have been designed for maximizing the utilization of heat-treatment furnaces of steel casting manufacturing. Extensive computational experiments were carried out to compare the performance of the heuristics with the estimated optimal value (using theWeibull technique) and for relative effectiveness among the heuristics. Further, the computational experiments show that the heuristic algorithms proposed in this paper are capable of obtaining near (statistically estimated) optimal utilization of heat-treatment furnaces and are also capable of solving any large size real-life problems with a relatively low computational effort.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Sadhana
Publisher:	Indian Academy of Sciences
Additional Information:	Copyright of ths article belongs to Indian Academy of Sciences.
Keywords:	Heat-treatment furnaces;heuristic algorithms;Weibull technique;scheduling batch processors.
Department/Centre:	Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Management Studies
Date Deposited:	19 Aug 2008
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:49
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/15621

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