Machine scheduling in underground mining: an application in the potash industry

Optimization of Trackless Equipment Scheduling in Underground Mines Using Genetic Algorithms

“…Schulze et al [18] studied how to dispatch trackless transportation equipment for underground potash mines to minimize completion time. The author models the problem as mixed-integer linear programming and uses CPLEX software to solve small-scale problems.…”

Scheduling hybrid flow shops with time windows

“…Hybrid flow shops occur widely in current-day manufacturing, and are often enriched with complex and practical constraints such as limited buffers (Baumann and Trautmann, 2013;Liu et al, 2017), no buffers (Grabowski and Pempera, 2000;Gicquel et al, 2012), limited-waiting restrictions (Gicquel et al, 2012), no-wait constraints (Grabowski and Pempera, 2000;Berghman et al, 2014;Berghman and Leus, 2015), machine eligibility constraints (Liu et al, 2017;Shahvari and Logendran, 2018), re-entrant flows (Chamnanlor et al, 2014;Schulze et al, 2016), batch processing (Liu et al, 2017;Tan et al, 2018), release dates (Shahvari and Logendran, 2018), sequence-dependent setup times (Bang and Kim, 2011), dedicated machines (Hadda et al, 2014), and so on. These technical constraints often arise with multiple stages (Almada-Lobo et al, 2008;Gicquel et al, 2012;Baumann and Trautmann, 2013;Chamnanlor et al, 2014) and large-scale instances (Almada-Lobo et al, 2008;Baumann and Trautmann, 2013;Schulze et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2017), resulting in a complicated and difficult problem. Chamnanlor et al (2014), for example, solve a case of hard-disk production with 17 stages.…”

“…This type of production layout is used very frequently in the manufacturing industry, especially in process industries, for instance in the production of food, beverages, chemicals, textile, glass, pulp, rubber, plastic, and fabricated metal. Due to this wide occurrence, the optimization of the scheduling of hybrid flow shops has attracted the attention from many scholars (e.g., for the glass industry (Almada-Lobo et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2017), consumer goods (Baumann and Trautmann, 2013), potash (Schulze et al, 2016), steel (Pan, 2016), and electronics (Bang and Kim, 2011;Shahvari and Logendran, 2018)). Apart from pure manufacturing settings, the twostage hybrid flow shop has also been used as a model for other planning environments, such as the integration of production and delivery (e.g., concrete production (Garcia and Lozano, 2005), food catering (Chen and Vairaktarakis, 2005), perishable foods (Viergutz and Knust, 2014)), and quay crane and yard truck scheduling for inbound containers (Kaveshgar and Huynh, 2015).…”

Editorial “Project Management and Scheduling”

“…The 10 papers arch the entire field from new approaches for well-known studied problems as in Schnell and Hartl (2016) to modeling of complex industry scheduling problems as in Schulze et al (2016), approaches and insights for new project organizations such as public private partnership presented in De Clerck and Demeulemeester (2016) to, finally, the treatment of classical machine scheduling problems as in Braun et al (2016) More detailed, this special issue contains the following contributions. Schnell and Hartl (2016) propose exact approaches using branch-and-bound with principles from constraint programming and boolean satisfiability for solving the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedence relations to optimality.…”

“…In the model, the planning time horizon is divided into time buckets used to evaluate resource usage, while starting and ending times for work packages are continuous. Schulze et al (2016) treat a scheduling problem that occurs in potash mining, where a block excavation sequence has to be found, taking into account a limited number of underground machines as well as safety-related restrictions and the objective is to minimize the maximum completion time of excavations. They transform the problem into a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with reentry, unrelated machines and job-precedences, and present a mixed-integer program, a multi-start heuristic and an adapted version of the Giffler and Thompson algorithm.…”