Title: A heuristic to minimise the idle time of the rental/critical machine in a flowshop

Authors: R. Pugazhenthi; M. Anthony Xavior

Addresses: School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT University, Vellore-632 014, Tamilnadu, India ' School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT University, Vellore-632 014, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: This article deals with a special case of flowshop. In which some special purpose machines are taken for rent and engaged for processing some special orders. The operation cost is to be optimised by increasing the utilisation or by reducing the idle time of such rental machine to availability. Even though many researchers made attempts with this objective, this paper proposed a new heuristic to diminish the idle time of the rental/critical machine. The Taillard benchmark problems are solved to analyse the proposed heuristic statistically. The proposed heuristic outperformed with existing heuristics significantly and the results are tabulated and analysed. Hence, the proposed heuristic cut down the cost of the rental/critical machine significantly.

Keywords: critical machines; rental machines; flowshops; heuristics; idle time reduction; operation time management; rental costs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2015.072734

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2015 Vol.22 No.4, pp.395 - 412

Received: 30 Jun 2014
Accepted: 15 Jul 2014
Published online: 28 Oct 2015 *

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