Production Planning and Scheduling for Parallel Machines with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times

The authors present a production planning and scheduling problem inspired by a collaboration project with an aluminum production company. The objective is to meet customers’ demands for some aluminum products with different characteristics while minimizing the total processing time. In the first part of the chapter, the authors present a literature review of production planning and scheduling problems, together with their different solution approaches. The second part focuses on aluminum production processes. It presents research work on production planning and scheduling in the aluminum industry. Then, it describes the problem and its characteristics together with the solution approach. The chapter finishes with numerical results, conclusions, and recommendations for future research work. The numerical results are validated by the planning service of the company. The approach proposed saves several days of work for the planners as the planning problem is solved within a few seconds. We discuss the reasons for such a very small CPU time and provide recommendations on how to solve harder real-life problems.