Scheduling in Kanban-Controlled Flowshops to Minimise the Makespan of Containers

In this paper we deal with the problem of scheduling in a kanban-controlled flowshop with material handling and finite input and output buffer storage between workstations. The objective is to minimise the makespan of containers. A heuristic algorithm, based on the simulated annealing (SA) technique, is developed. We present a new perturbation scheme and test the effectiveness of the proposed simulated annealing algorithm for solving the kanban-controlled flowshop scheduling problems. The proposed SA algorithm is evaluated relative to the existing heuristic. The results of the computational evaluation reveal that the proposed SA algorithm performs better than the existing heuristic.