Welcoming Remarks

Multi-Stage Material Handling (MSMH) processes are designed to manufacture materials requiring a series of treatments and in industry, they are broadly used due to their capability to handle large work orders and compatibility with materials with different recipes.  A typical example is electroplating process.  A hoist handles the transportation of each job among units (stages) according to its processing recipe.  The hoist movement plan is predetermined through optimization and this plan is repeated to perform continuity.  Obviously, the ultimate goal is to maximize the productivity within each movement plan, which is equivalent to minimize the cycle time to finish one work order.  The optimization process is generally called Cyclic Hoist Scheduling (CHS), since every movement plan is a cycle due to its repeatability.  This precondition in term of hoist operation and unit usage is general for most cases.  However, it could block the really optimal results.

In this study, this precondition has been relaxed for multi-capacity units, thus the unit usage can be more flexible. Thus, the real optimality can be found through CHS.  To deal with the cycle connection issue from the relaxation of the precondition, a new module Cycle Connection Identification (CCI) is proposed.  Obtained hoist schedule will be checked.  Once a schedule with cycle connection problems is identified, a new cycle will be scheduled forcing the smooth connection with the first cycle.  The objective of scheduling a new cycle is to match the beginning of the first cycle and the ending of the second cycle.  If the two-cycle group is still with cycle connection issue, more cycles will be scheduled till the cycle group is free from cycle connection problems.  Each cycle is called a sub-cycle and the constructed cycle group without cycle connection problems is called a full cycle.  Note that in each sub-cycle, the work order and all transportation operations are completed.

In this paper, hoist scheduling models with/without such a precondition have been developed and proposed as mixed integer linear programming.  The performance of the two models is tested through case studies and the difference is compared and demonstrated in detail.