LAUSR

Abstract This paper studies the scheduling problem for the flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) under uncertain machine failure disruptions, where machine allocations and job schedules need to be determined to achieve a set of production due-date requirements as well as possible. A robust scheduling optimization model is proposed based on the concept of threshold scenario, bounded by which the due-dates are guaranteed to be achieved. It is shown that the associated stochastic scheduling problem can be equivalently solved by computing the solution of a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). Computational results show that our proposed model performs well in achieving the planned due-dates under uncertainty when compared to various standard approaches. The practical applicability of our approach is verified using a real stamping industry application, in which the stamping parts are various types of voice coil motor yokes used in commercial hard disk drive actuators. Apart from FMSs, the proposed approach can also be applied to various other industries including project scheduling, airline scheduling, transportation scheduling.