Single-Station Unrelated Parallel Machines Scheduling Problem: A Case Study in a Real Factory

This paper solves the production planning for a real wind tower plant. Specifically, it solves the bottleneck station of the plant, which has machines with a speed that depends both on the machine and on the job itself to be produced, i.e. Unrelated Parallel Machines. In addition, among these machines there is one with lower capacity that cannot complete the jobs, so it is proposed to use it as a support for the rest of the machines that can, and therefore conserve the resource. To solve this problem, the adaptation of the Genetic Algorithm and a Constructive Heuristic developed for this type of problem are presented. Finally, a set of real data provided by the factory is used for comparison. The maximum Completion Time and the execution times of each algorithm are shown and compared.