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Production planning and scheduling in the glass container industry: A VNS approach

2008; Elsevier BV; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.ijpe.2007.02.052

1873-7579

Bernardo Almada‐Lobo, José Fernando Oliveira, Maria Antónia Carravilla,

Advanced Manufacturing and Logistics Optimization

Inspired by a case study, this paper reports a successful application of VNS to the production planning and scheduling problem that arises in the glass container industry. This is a multi-facility production system, where each facility has a set of furnaces where the glass paste is produced in order to meet the demand, being afterwards distributed to a set of parallel molding machines. Since the neighborhoods used are not nested, they are not ordered by increasing sizes, but by means of a new empirical measure to assess the distance between any two solutions. Neighborhood sizes decrease significantly throughout the search thus suggesting the use of a scheme in which efficiency is placed over effectiveness in a first step, and the opposite in a second step. We test this variant as well as other two with a real-world problem instance from our case study.