1999 journal article
Dry kiln scheduling in furniture production
IIE Transactions, 31(8), 733–738.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
12. Responsible Consumption and Production
(Web of Science)
Source: NC State University Libraries
Added: August 6, 2018
In this paper, a dry kiln scheduling problem from the furniture manufacturing industry is considered. Factory-specified due dates for orders, kiln availability, kiln capacity, and travel time from the kilns to the factories are all incorporated in a model which is formulated as an integer linear program. The objective of the formulation is to minimize the maximum tardiness of orders arriving at the plants by solving a special case of scheduling n independent jobs on m non-identical parallel ciachines. Because of the computational complexity, and the fact that standard integer programming packages appear to perform very poorly on the problem, a heuristic approach is developed. Computational experience is provided which indicates that the heuristic gives very high quality solutions to problems in near real-time.