A two-stage heuristic method for vulcanization production scheduling

There are more product specifications, great production and much equipment over the whole process of rubber tire vulcanization. Aiming at rubber tire vulcanization production schedulingsingle-process, parallel machines scheduling problem with special process constraint, a two-stage scheduling strategy of vulcanizationproduction, the load distribution of equipment and operation planssequencing, is proposed. Equipment load distribution model of vulcanizationmachine based on 0–1 integer programmingis built and improved maximum elimination algorithm is proposed. Operative plansorting model based on 0–1 integer programmingis built and an optimal algorithm based on minimum delay time is proposed. The algorithm was tested by online data. Results show that the two-stage scheduling method can quickly workout the optimal scheduling planning of vulcanization, reduce the production cost, and improve productivity. The method will lay the firm groundwork for application to production process in the future.