The Hybrid Flexible Flowshop with Transportation Times

Abstract

This paper presents the hybrid, flexible flowshop problem with transportation times between stages, which is an extension of an existing scheduling problem that is well-studied in the literature. We explore different models for the problem with Constraint Programming, MILP, and local search, and compare them on generated benchmark problems that reflect the problem of the industrial partner. We then study two different factory layout design problems, and use the optimization tool to understand the impact of the design choices on the solution quality