Operation Skipping Flow Shop Scheduling and Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a modern approach where the connectivity between different stages of the production process and the consumers is enhanced. In this paper a relevant problem for both Industry 4.0 and flow shop literature is addressed: an operation skipping flow shop scheduling problem. A solution method to optimize total tardiness, which is novel to the related literature, is presented. The solution approach consists of two stages. In the first stage, a genetic algorithm is applied to obtain an efficient solution in a permutation fashion. In the second stage, the solution obtained in the previous stage is improved with a simulated annealing algorithm considering a non-permutation strategy. Results show that NPFS solutions outperform PFS solutions for this problem. Furthermore, if the percentage of skipping operations increases the impact of the NPFS approach increases too.