Leader-follower Joint Process Design And Job Shop Scheduling Optimization For Product Family

The key of mass customization manufacturing lies in design and manufacturing for product family. Compared with mass production, process design and job-shop scheduling for product family presents many new features. Based on non-cooperation, hierarchy and interdisciplinary feature of process design and job-shop scheduling in product family production environment, this paper proposed a leader-follower joint optimization models of process design and job-shop scheduling for product family. Also reported was an empirical case study to validate effectiveness and robustness of the model. Basic frame of research in the future was further discussed at the end of this paper.With the discussion of characteristics of process design and job-shop scheduling in product family production environment, the necessity of joint optimization between process design and job-shop scheduling was elaborated in the first chapter, considering their features of non-cooperation, hierarchy and interdisciplinary. Related works were reviewed in terms of multiple process design, job-shop scheduling and bi-level programming with their applications. The background leading to this research was also reviewed, and the content as well as the structure of the paper was illustrated.The decision-making process of joint optimization model of process design and job shop scheduling was described in the second chapter. A set of modeling formalisms and quantitative evaluation indexes which considered the factors of process commonality, process cost and make span were developed to provide foundations to construct leader-follower joint optimization model with bi-level programming.A genetic algorithm based method was provided to solve the bi-level programming model in the third chapter. Some background on genetic algorithm was also introduced in this chapter, followed with description of genetic coding, individual selection, mutation operator and initial population etc. A generalized method and procedure to solve the bi-level programming with heuristic evolutionary algorithm was also formalized.A case study was reported in the fourth chapter to validate effectiveness and robustness of the model. With discussing their limitation and validation, different models were compared under distinct strategies and application field.The last chapter concluded the paper and proposed the contribution and limitation of this research. Basic frame of research in the future was further discussed.