The problems of production scheduling and sequencing refer to decision making regarding the designation of jobs to available resources and their subsequent order to optimize pre-defined performance measures. From the early days of research in this area until this last decade, the publication of case studies has been scarce, with their frequency only increasing very recently. This survey aims to highlight practical research and case studies published in the literature in the scheduling area, identifying the main characteristics of the problems treated, trends in this research and also gaps showing potential areas for future study.
The integrated lot sizing and cutting stock problem is studied in the context of furniture production. The goal is to capture the interdependencies between the determination of the lot size and of the cutting process in order to reduce raw material waste and production and inventory costs. An integrated mathematical model is proposed that includes lot sizing decisions with safety stock level constraints and saw capacity constraints taking into account saw cycles. The model solution is compared to a simulation of the common practice of taking the lot size and the cutting stock decisions separately and sequentially. Given the large number of variables in the model, a column-generation solution method is proposed to solve the problem. An extensive computational study is conducted using instances generated based on data collected at a typical small scale Brazilian factory. It includes an analysis of the performance of the integrated approach against sequential approaches, when varying the costs in the objective function. The integrated approach performs well, both in terms of reducing the total cost of raw materials as well as the inventory costs of pieces. They also indicate that the model can support the main decisions taken and can bring improvements to the factory's production planning.
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