Distributed Heterogeneous Panel Furniture Production with Lot-Sizing and Scheduling

With the promotion of productivity and increased customer requirements, furniture enterprises’ production modes have undergone significant changes, shifting from the previous make-to-stocking to the nowadays make-to-order mode. This requires more optimised formulation and implementation of production plans to improve business profit in this competitive marketplace. Production planning and scheduling with more degrees of freedom (DOF) facing the order-lots-job hierarchy of heterogeneous factories, therefore, requires further attention from the existing studies of distributed heterogeneous panel furniture production with lot-sizing and scheduling. This paper proposes a two-stage scheduling optimisation algorithm based on heuristic order splitting and a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA). Such an approach using heuristics and a two-stage optimisation algorithm can solve this multi-DOF, multi-dimensional planning problem well. For approach validation and evaluation, numerical experiments are employed to test the applicability of the heuristic order-splitting method under certain circumstances, whilst real-world furniture manufacturing environment data is used to verify the experimental results. The numerical experimental results show that the proposed two-stage algorithm based on heuristic order-splitting methods is readily applicable to scheduling optimisation with orders of different scales and is worthy of further real-world applications.