Optimizing total tardiness and resource occupation in a textile sewing shop using a multi-objective heuristic

This study addresses a dual resource constrained flexible job shop scheduling problem occurring in a textile sewing shop with multi-purpose machines and multi-skilled operators. Sequence-dependent setup times may occur for both operators and machines. Two objectives are considered, namely the total tardiness and the resource occupation. A heuristic exploiting the earliest starting time and the estimated tardiness of jobs is proposed to address this problem. A mixed-integer linear programming model aiming at minimizing the total tardiness is used as a benchmark. A detailed computational analysis is carried out on a set of industrial instances. The performance of the heuristic is evaluated on both criteria. Results highlight the relevance of the heuristic in obtaining solutions that balance total tardiness and resource utilization, demonstrating its applicability to real-world scenarios.