Job scheduling in a group technology environment for a single facility

A dynamic programming-based formulation has been developed to schedule jobs effectively in the group technology environment. The jobs may form several distinct groups to be scheduled for processing on a single facility. Switching from group to group requires a major change in the setup of the facility while jobs within a group can be accommodated with minor adjustments which take only small setup times. The group technology concept becomes a simplifying factor in the DP formulation of this scheduling problem facilitating the exact solution faster with more jobs than it was possible ever before. Computational experience with a set of example problems is also provided.