Solving a realistic hybrid and flexible flow shop scheduling problem through constraint programming: industrial case in a packaging company

This paper deals with an application of constraint programming (CP) for a hybrid flexible flow shop scheduling problem (HFFS) with realistic features, such as job-dependent and sequence-dependent setup times, due dates, and waiting policies, with the aim of minimizing the total tardiness, so that the workshop can fulfill the delivery deadline. After describing all the characteristics of the proposed problem, we formulate it using CP model. Numerical simulations are prformed to evaluate its performance. The results show that the proposed CP model is highly effective in finding good quality solutions for both small-sized and large-sized instances. The conducted experiments, using case study instances, show that our model performs well at exploring optimal solutions in a short computational time and hence allows us to find good quality solutions. The proposed method can be easily adjusted to a huge number of real-life environements for scheduling problems with similar features.