Output details
15 - General Engineering
Coventry University
An effective hybrid discrete differential evolution algorithm for the flow shop scheduling with intermediate buffers
This research, funded (£30,000 equivalent) by Chinese National Science Foundation for international cooperation (68034004), developed innovative scheduling mechanisms for large-scale and complex production lines, with up to 500 jobs and 20 machines, to minimise completion time of multiple jobs. Simulation was conducted to benchmark the work with typical cases from literatures to show improved production efficiency. The success of the research led to an award of €1.5M FP7 industry-academia partnership and pathway project, Smarter (PEOPLE-2013-IAPP-610675), to deploy the mechanisms in practical production lines in UK and Sweden (NIFES Consulting Group, Associate Director, Donald Lack: donald.lack@nifes.co.uk).