1. Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
2. FEUP - Faculdade de Engenharia
3. FEUP - Dissertação

Author(s):	Hugo Soares da Costa Faria Pires
Title:	Scheduling strategies for the furniture industry
Issue Date:	2021-07-22
Description:	Technological developments and more demanding production standards have constantly been pushing the envelope, changing the perception of what is possible and desired in manufacturing processes. Such improvements are often made at marginal cost, yet have the potential to significantly benefit performance, enabling a strong competitive advantage. In this case study, a factory in the furniture industry is considered, where there are vast improvement opportunities and an increase in flexibility is needed. Furthermore, this problem can be best approximated by the flow shop model and the most critical characteristic is sequence-dependent setup times. To address this problem, an iterated greedy with local search meta-heuristic is implemented, which will be responsible for scheduling production orders in the way that best suits makespan and, consequently, productivity. Additionally, OptQuest, the optimiser functionally built into the Flexsim simulating software was also tested against the meta-heuristic and, still through simulation, a local rule was implemented, which allowed each workstation to define its own sequence of jobs, to minimise setup times. Lastly, the best performing of the previous methods was also compared to the original heuristic that had previously been specifically created for this problem. Through testing, it was found that the iterated greedy with local search meta-heuristic was able to generate solutions that had a much better makespan value than the ones produced by OptQuest, while the local rule was not able to provide significant improvement. Then, the meta-heuristic was compared to the original heuristic and, although the newly implemented algorithm did not consider all characteristics of the problem, productivity far outperformed that of the original technique.
Subject:	Ciências da engenharia e tecnologias Engineering and technology
Scientific areas:	Ciências da engenharia e tecnologias Engineering and technology
DOI:	10.34626/8bs6-n929
TID identifier:	202820505
URI:	https://hdl.handle.net/10216/135138
Document Type:	Dissertação
Rights:	openAccess
Appears in Collections:	FEUP - Dissertação

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