Minimizing general setup costs in a two-stage production system

This paper addresses a problem arising in the coordination between two consecutive stages of a production system. Production is organized in batches of identical jobs. Each job is characterized by two distinct attributes, and all jobs sharing the same attributes are processed together as a single batch. Due to the structural and organizational characteristics of the production system, the two stages have to process the same batch sequence. When two consecutive batches with different attributes are processed, at least one stage must pay a setup, in order to reconfigure its own devices. Each stage incurs a setup cost which is a general non-decreasing function of the number of its own setups, and the problem consists of finding a batch sequence minimizing the total setup costs of the production system. We present an original solution approach for the considered problem which is shown to be very effective by an extensive experimental campaign.