A mathematical model for production scheduling in a hard disk drive component industry

Abstract

In this paper, a mathematical model for scheduling problem in a 2nd tier supplier of the hard disk drivesupply chain is addressed. The problem is a particular case with some characteristics which are 1) themachines that used to produce are unrelated parallel machines, 2) the setup operation between two productsis sequence-dependent setup, 3) the manufacturer applies one product – one line – one shift policy, 4) theearly shifts must be assigned, not the later one(s) in each working day (continuous production). The effectiveproduction scheduling helps the manufacturer to avoid unnecessary setup time and easily managingproduction plan. A mathematical model is developed to solve the problem in order to minimize the productionrelated costs including 1) production cost, 2) setup cost, 3) inventory cost and 4) backorder cost. Themathematical model is examined with a set of various problems. The results demonstrate that the proposedmathematical model could optimally solve the small sized problems. For the large size problems, it is difficult tosolve, since it requires long computation time.