An order scheduling problem in seru production system considering worker assignment

As one of the latest production modes, seru production, which is arising from Japanese manufacturing practice, has been attracted more and more attention due to its efficiency, flexibility, and quick response ability. In this paper, the scheduling problem with worker assignment in the seru production system is studied where a set of orders must be scheduled over the parallel serus according to the due date. This problem is constructed as a multi-objective model to minimise the total variable cost (TVC) and total idle time (TIT). Then, according to the characteristics of proposed model, the K-means clustering is used to solve the worker assignment and the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used to solve the order scheduling problem. Finally, the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm are demonstrated by the numerical examples, and the results show that the artificial bee colony algorithm has a good scalability. Copyright © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.