Transient Modeling and Scheduling for Heterogeneous Serial Lines with Bernoulli Machines and Finite Buffers

In recent years, with the increasing emphasis on intelligent manufacturing at the national level, the influence of flexible manufacturing systems and distributed production in the manufacturing industry has been expanding. Meanwhile, serial lines with limited buffers and random machine failures have been commonly seen in practical flexible production. When orders from the same customer are produced in different lines, the required production processes and cycles may differ. In such cases, these serial lines can be referred to as heterogeneous lines. This paper offers a model and analysis of a mixed-series assembly line featuring Bernoulli machines and finite buffer storage, followed by a discussion on the optimal scheduling problem for job allocation. A novel strategy is introduced for addressing the scheduling problem, utilizing a discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through numerical experiments.