A Heuristic Bicriteria Scheduling Approach for a Flooring Production Planning Problem

We consider a scheduling problem motivated by a particular process step in the production of rubber flooring. In this step, a set of given jobs of different colors has to pass through a heated pressure roller, one job at a time. Since different jobs require different process temperatures, and heating up the machine is expensive, we want to minimize the total temperature change. On the other hand, we aim at minimizing the alternations between bright and dark colors to minimize cleaning effort. We provide an efficient heuristic for finding all job sequences that are Pareto optimal with respect to the two objectives.