AN EFFICIENT HEURISTIC TO BALANCE TRADE-OFFS BETWEEN UTILIZATION AND PATIENT FLOWTIME IN OPERATING ROOM MANAGEMENT

Balancing trade-offs between production cost and holding cost is critical for production and operations management. Utilization of an operating room affects production cost, which relates to makespan, and patient flowtime affects holding cost. There are trade-offs between two objectives, to minimize makespan and to minimize flowtime. However, most existing constructive heuristics focus only on single-objective optimization. In the current literature, NEH is the best constructive heuristic to minimize makespan, and LR heuristic is the best to minimize flowtime. In this thesis, we propose a current and future deviation (CFD) heuristic to balance trade-offs between makespan and flowtime minimizations. Based on 5400 randomly generated instances and 120 instances in Taillard’s benchmarks, our CFD heuristic outperforms NEH and LR heuristics on trade-off balancing, and achieves the most stable performances from the perspective of statistical process control

Diseño de una metodología de programación de producción para la reducción de costos en un flow shop híbrido flexible mediante el uso de algoritmos genéticos. Aplicación a la industria textil

La industria textil posee configuración productiva flow shop híbrido flexible, además de una serie de particularidades que hacen que los modelos estándares de programación de producción no sean aplicables. Se ha demostrado la naturaleza N-P completo del problema, por lo que el uso de meta heurísticas está bien justificado. Considerando la importancia de la reducción de los costos de fabricación en la industria textil colombiana, se propone una nueva metodología de programación de producción basada en algoritmos genéticos, que tiene presente algunas de las complejidades de la industria textil (tiempos de montaje dependientes de la secuencia, máquinas paralelas no relacionadas, cumplimiento de fechas de entrega) y permite la reducción de sus costos de producción. Al aplicarla a un problema basado en la industria textil colombiana se obtuvo una mejora promedio del 22,39% y 22,36% con respecto al método SPT y a un método aleatorio, respectivamente. Asimismo se reduce casi en un 100% el incumplimiento de fechas de entrega. Se concluye que la metodología es efectiva y que puede extenderse su aplicación a otros sectores industriales con configuración flow shop híbrido flexible. Futuros trabajos podrían considerar otras complejidades como los lotes de transferencia variables, la entrada dinámica y la maleabilidad, o aplicar la metodología a otro tipo de industrias con esta configuración productivaAbstract : Textile industry can be described by the productive configuration denominated Hybrid Flow Shop, and has a number of characteristics that make the standard scheduling models not applicable. It has been proved the NP-complete nature of the problem, so that the use of meta-heuristics is well justified. Considering the importance of reducing manufacturing costs in Colombian textile industry, a new production scheduling methodology based on genetic algorithms is proposed, which take into account some of the complexities presented in the textile industry (sequence dependent setup times, unrelated parallel machines, compliance with due dates) and allows the reduction of production costs. When the methodology was applied to a Colombian textile industry-based problem, an average improvement of 22.39% and 22.36% in comparison with the SPT method and random method, respectively, were obtained. It was also reduced almost in 100% the failure to due dates. It is concluded that the methodology is effective and can extend its application to other industries with a hybrid flow shop configuration. Future work could consider other complexities such as variable transfer batches, dynamic input and malleability, or apply the methodology to other industries in this productive configurationMaestrí