Jose M. Framinan

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Seville

Data and materials of benchmark instances, source code, and spreadsheets.

Recently, closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) are receiving growing attentions by the academic world since they represent a sustainable network for circular economies. However, the impact of production control policies (PCPs) on the performance of CLSCs is still unexplored. Then, this paper investigates the role of the Demand-Driven Material Requirem...

In this paper, a novel variant of the open shop scheduling problem where the jobs have sequence-dependent processing times is addressed. The performance measure considered is the minimization of the length of the schedule (makespan). This problem arises in several real-life settings and, particularly, our work is inspired in scheduling samples in a...

Researchers have been paying particular attention to scheduling problems with processing times constraints in recent years, aiming to adopt more realistic assumptions. This paper aims to study the open shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent processing times. A integer linear programming and a constraint programming (CP) models are proposed...

Due to the complex nature of some products and the different quality of returns, in closed-loop supply chains there might be different types of reverse processes and reverse flows, including repaired, refurbished, remanufactured, or recycled goods. These reprocessed goods return to different echelons of the supply chain according to their quality,...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a disruptive production technology that challenges many well-established, conventional practices in Operations and Supply Chain Management decisions. Consequently, new context-specific decision problems have appeared in this area, while existing decision problems must be adapted or extended to this context. In this ov...

Motivated by the high variability of markets occurred in the last years, which in turns determined significant uncertainty in lead times and supply chain dynamics, this paper introduces a data-driven framework based on machine learning and metaheuristic optimization to dynamically select the most suitable replenishment strategy for a complex two-ec...

In this paper we investigate how decentralised scheduling approaches can be used to improve manufacturing scheduling. In view of the potential shown by some of these novel decentralised approaches, we conduct a series of experiments on a set of job shop instances subject to different degrees of variability in their processing times, and compare the...

Industrial symbiosis has been recognized as a promising strategy to move towards a Circular Economy. However, its impact on the supply chain dynamics is still unexplored. For this reason, with this work we aim to contribute to this research gap analysing the dynamic performance of symbiotic supply chains. Through the agent-based modeling technique,...

In this paper, we present a deterministic permutation flowshop scheduling problem with a new objective function, the total core idle time. The interest of this objective is related to reduce the energy consumption of the system, taking into account that the energy needed during the processing times is constant, and that machines are switched off du...

The permutation flowshop scheduling problem is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem with several real-world applications. In this paper we address a green variant of the problem with controllable processing times and two objective functions: one related to the service level of the factory (makespan) and another one related to the tot...

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling jobs in a flowshop layout where the machines can operate at different speeds and require an amount of a resource that is a non-decreasing function of its speed. Furthermore, there is a limit in the maximum amount of the resource that can be consumed, so the problem serves to model either a constraint o...

In this paper, we investigate the impact in terms of Fill Rate of production control policies in a two-product, two-echelon supply chain dynamic problem with production capacity. The factory node is subject to two different disruptive occurrences (i.e. failure events and changeovers) that can cause unforeseen problems in the supply chain. To contro...

This paper deals with the so-called Open Shop Scheduling Problem (OSSP) with makespan objective, which consists of scheduling a set of jobs that must visit a set of machines in no established order so the maximum completion time among the jobs is minimised. This problem is known to be NP-hard, and the absence of specific routes for the processing o...

A Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) is a supply chain that includes the recollection and recovery of their used products. This may include some of the following activities:

This chapter is developed to investigate the effect of supply chain dynamics on a number of aspects related to different dimensions of the quality of the information acquired by each node in the supply chain. First, how sharing node information across the supply chain can improve inventory variability is studied for different scenarios. Next, diffe...

In this chapter, the relevance of observing, measuring and improving the dynamic behaviour of a supply chain (as opposed to focusing on the stationary state) is discussed. The bullwhip effect is discussed at length, recollecting his ‘history’ and pool of causes: First the behavioural nature of the bullwhip effect as observed in the early 90’s most...

Although in the previous chapters, we have discussed many aspects related to the bullwhip effect in SCs, we have also seen that these hardly cover the existing state-of-the-art field and a number of further readings have been suggested at the end of each chapter so the reader can get a more comprehensive view of the last developments. Instead, in t...

In this chapter, a basic model to understand the dynamic behaviour of the supply chain is presented. First, a brief introduction on the role of modelling in the context of Operations Management/Supply Chain Management is given, so the reader can understand the process of abstraction of the essential hypotheses and constraints from a real-world prob...

In the models developed in the preceding chapters of the book, we assume that the SC has a linear structure. This may not be the case in most real-life SCs, where complex structures with several nodes in an echelon may appear. In these complex SC structures, the challenge is to evaluate the dynamic effects of the order and inventory amplifications....

In this chapter, the main activities taking place in the supply chain are discussed in terms of the SCOR model and, among them, we identify those related to demand modelling and forecast, and to inventory management, as the main issues influencing the dynamics of the supply chain. The AR(1) time series to model the demand is then introduced, along...

Since the basic models developed in Chap. 4 do not adequately capture many real-life supply chains due to their restrictive hypotheses, in this chapter, we analyse the effect of the removal of these hypotheses to consider a number of scenarios observed in practice. These scenarios include the removal of the assumption of the possibility of negative...

This chapter is devoted to present the evolution of the supply chains as the main structure for the production and distribution of goods to the final customers. The evolution of supply chains, as well as the factors influencing their growth are discussed in the chapter, together with some definitions and examples. An informal definition of a supply...

This book discusses supply chain management, focusing on developments within modelling the dynamic behaviour of the supply chain. Aimed at postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners, this book provides an in-depth knowledge of the dynamics of supply chains. Business trends such as the globalisation process and the increase of competition...

Batching is a well-known cause of the bullwhip effect. Despite being very common in many industries to leverage economies of scale, it has been little explored due to its nonlinear complexity. This work examines how order-quantity batching affects the performance of closed-loop supply chains, which are gaining importance as a result of their enviro...

Although the customer order scheduling problem to minimize the total completion time has received a lot of attention from researchers, the literature has not considered so far the case where there are sequence-dependent setups between jobs belonging to different orders, a case that may occurs in real-life scenarios. For this NP-hard problem we deve...

In this paper, we address the assembly flowshop scheduling problem, which is a generalisation of two well-known scheduling problems in the literature: the three-stage Assembly Scheduling Problem (ASP) and its variant with two stages denoted as the two-stage ASP. For this problem, we prove several theoretical results which are used to propose a spee...

The technological advances recently brought to the manufacturing arena (collectively known as Industry 4.0) offer huge possibilities to improve decision-making processes in the shop floor by enabling the integration of information in real-time. Among these processes, scheduling is often cited as one of the main beneficiaries, given its data-intensi...

The assembly scheduling problem is a common layout with many applications in real manufacturing scenarios. Despite the high number of studies dealing with this problem, no benchmark has been proposed up-to-now in the literature generating neither hard nor balanced instances. In this paper we present two extensive sets of instances for two variants...

We explore the value of information sharing for smoothing the dynamics of supply chains when some echelons do not collaborate. To this end, we study seven information sharing structures in a four-echelon supply chain using a system dynamics approach. We find that the overall propagation of the bullwhip effect in supply chains decreases as the numbe...

Increasing the understanding of the management of closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) is fundamental to accelerate the much-desired transition towards the circular economy. From this perspective, we investigate the value of proportional order-up-to policies (POUT) policies and the adjustment of their inventory controllers in these systems. These poli...

In this paper, we investigate a two-echelon, two-product Supply Chain (SC) inspired by a real-world production/distribution firm, in which the product change-over time, necessary to switch from a product to another, induces a variable capacity in the factory. Such a varying production capacity is further exacerbated by the machine breakdowns that m...

In this paper, we study a variant of the customer order scheduling problem when sequence-dependent setup times cannot be ignored. The performance measure adopted is the makespan minimization. The existence of sequence-dependent setup times makes this problem to be NP-hard. Furthermore, the solution encoding usually employed for other variants of th...

These instances are proposed by Prata, Bruno de Athayde, Rodrigues, Carlos Diego, Framinan, Jose. Customer order scheduling problem to minimize makespan with sequence-dependent setup times. Preprint.

In this paper, an m-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with limited workforce in charge of performing setup operations is addressed. Indeed, such workforce represents a critical resource since the number of workers assigned to each production stage is lower than the number of machines in the same stage. A novel discrete backtracking search a...

The Bullwhip Effect manifests itself in the form of an increased order and inventory variability in the uppermost nodes of the supply chain. This dynamic phenomenon is not yet well understood in closed-loop supply chain settings, despite their growing importance in modern societies pursuing circular economy opportunities. Indeed, the problem-specif...

The closed-loop dynamics of sustainable supply chains play a key role in their performance, as the reverse flows of returns and remanufactured products entail new sources of uncertainty that alter the normal performance of the supply chain. However most of the studies assume a linear supply chain with a single reverse flow of returns, which is a si...

This paper focuses on the minimisation of the makespan in a hybrid flow shop layout with multiple servers and identical machines. Servers are renewable secondary resources responsible of executing the setup times of the jobs. Although the use of human supervision is very extensive in real manufacturing scenarios, its study in academia is still very...

In this paper, we present two extensive sets of instances for the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem. The first set is composed of 240 instances with a small number of jobs, while in the second set 240 instances with a large number of jobs are considered. A rigorous methodology to develop these testbeds is proposed, so the instances comply with th...

This paper addresses the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with availability constraints where the machines are not available cyclically and the starting and finishing times of the periodic unavailability intervals are known in advance. In our case, this constraint is due to the shift calendar in a company in the aerospace industry, where all...

The goal of manufacturing scheduling is to allocate a set of jobs to the machines in the shop so these jobs are processed according to a given criterion (or set of criteria). Such criteria are based on properties of the jobs to be scheduled (e.g., their completion times, due dates); so it is not clear how these (short-term) criteria impact on (long...

In this paper, we address the two-stage multi-machine assembly scheduling problem, a layout consisting of several dedicated parallel machines in the first stage and identical parallel machines in the second stage. The objective considered is the minimisation of the total completion time. Despite its relevance in practice and its NP-hard nature, thi...

In this paper we reflect on the role of information sharing on increasing the resilience of supply chains. Specifically, we highlight the lack of studies addressing this relevant topic in closed-loop supply chains. Then, we introduce the works covered by the Special Issue “Information Sharing on Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains” to investiga...

The scheduling literature is abundant on approximate methods for permutation flowshop scheduling, as this problem is NP-hard for the majority of objectives usually considered. Among these methods, some of the most efficient ones use an insertion-type of neighbourhood to construct high-quality solutions. It is not then surprising that using accelera...

In the open shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times, there is no established order for the processing of the jobs, which leads to a large number of possible solutions for the scheduling problem. Furthermore, there is a setup time between two consecutive operations, which depends on the job previously processed. In this work we p...

In this paper, we analyse several issues concerning the most efficient approximate algorithms for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with makespan objective. On the one hand, it is not clear which algorithm obtains the best solutions for the problem, since (1) conflicting results have been reported regarding the implementation of a key par...

Remanufacturing practices in closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) are often characterised by highly variable lead times due to the uncertain quality of returns. However, the impact of such variability on the dynamic benefits derived from adopting circular economy models remains largely unknown in the closed-loop literature. To fill the gap, this work...

In this research study, a single machine batch-processing problem with release dates to minimize the total completion times of jobs is considered. The machine is able to process at most a certain number of jobs at the same time and the total size of the jobs allocated to a batch cannot exceed the machine capacity. Since the research problem has bee...

In this paper we address the classical hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with makespan objective. As this problem is known to be NP-hard and a very common layout in real-life manufacturing scenarios, many studies have been proposed in the literature to solve it. These contributions use different solution representations of the feasible schedules,...

This paper addresses a novel distributed assembly permutation flowshop scheduling problem that has important applications in modern supply chains and manufacturing systems. The problem considers a number of identical factories, each one consisting of a flowshop for part-processing plus an assembly line for product-processing. The objective is to mi...

In a time where detailed, instantaneous and accurate information on shop-floor status is becoming available in many manufacturing companies due to Information Technologies initiatives such as Smart Factory or Industry 4.0, a question arises regarding when and how this data can be used to improve scheduling decisions. While it is acknowledged that a...

This work considers a scheduling problem identified in a factory producing customised Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) equipment. More specifically, the metal folding section is modelled as unrelated parallel machines with machine eligibility and sequence-dependent setup times. The objective under consideration is the minimisation o...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic behavior of a closed-loop supply chain with capacity restrictions both in the manufacturing and remanufacturing lines. We assume it operates in a context of a twofold uncertainty by considering stochastic demand and return processes. From a bullwhip perspective, we evaluate how the four relevant factors (sp...

Several studies have reported that capacitated supply chains may benefit from an improved dynamic performance as compared to unconstrained ones. This occurs as a consequence of the capacity limit acting as a production smoothing filter. In this research, the relationship between capacity restrictions and the operational performance of supply chains...

We investigate two main sources of information inaccuracies (i.e., errors and delays) in demand information sharing along the supply chain (SC). Firstly, we perform a systematic literature review on inaccuracy in demand information sharing and its impact on supply chain dynamics. Secondly, we model several SC settings using system dynamics and asse...

This paper addresses the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem to minimise makespan, a well-known scheduling problem for which many constructive heuristics have been proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, the state of the art is not clear due to partial or non homogeneous comparisons. In this paper, we review these heuristics and perform a compreh...

We address a stochastic operating room scheduling problem which consists of assigning an intervention date and operating room to surgeries on the waiting list, minimizing the under- and overtime costs of the operating rooms, and the cost of exceeding the capacity constraints of the system. Uncertainties in surgeries duration, in the arrivals of eme...

In this paper we address the problem of scheduling jobs on a single machine with cyclical machine availability periods. In this problem, the scheduling horizon is composed of periods where the machine is available followed by other periods where no operation can be performed. In the literature, the problem is denoted as scheduling with periodic mai...

This work analyses partial information sharing involving retailers with different operational configurations. Retailers are characterized by four operational factors, i.e., demand variance, lead time average, forecasting period and inventory policy. The findings show that the performance improvement based on information sharing depends on retailers...

Many activities in industry and services require the scheduling of tasks that can be concurrently executed, the most clear example being perhaps the assembly of products carried out in manufacturing. Although numerous scientific contributions have been produced on this area over the last decades, the wide extension of the problems covered and the l...

This paper addresses the parallel flowshop scheduling problem with stochastic processing times, where a product composed of several components has to be finished at a particular moment. These components are processed in independent parallel factories, and each factory can be modeled as a permutation flowshop. The processing time of each operation a...

In the last years, researchers are paying special attention to scheduling in distributed environments due to the increasing benefits of multi-factory manufacture. In this paper, we address the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem to minimise the total flowtime. Since, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been addressed...

This paper analyses the impact on supply chain performance of adopting different strategies to implement partial information sharing among heterogeneous retailers. Supply chains are modelled using a multi-agent systems approach. We find that the strategy adopted to construct the partial information sharing structure (i.e., the retailers who share i...

In this paper, we address the hybrid flowshop scheduling problem for makespan minimisation. More specifically, we are interested in the special case where there are missing operations, i.e. some stages are skipped, a condition inspired in a realistic problem found in a plastic manufacturer. The main contribution of our paper is twofold. On the one...

The problem addressed in this paper belongs to the topic of order scheduling, in which customer orders - composed of different individual jobs - are scheduled so the objective sought refers to the completion times of the complete orders. Despite the practical and theoretical relevance of this problem, the literature on order scheduling is not very...

The permutation flow shop scheduling problem is one of the most studied operations research related problems. Literally, hundreds of exact and approximate algorithms have been proposed to optimise several objective functions. In this paper we address the total tardiness criterion, which is aimed towards the satisfaction of customers in a make-to-or...

In this paper we address the 2-stage assembly scheduling problem where there are m machines in the first stage to manufacture the components of a product and one assembly station (machine) in the second stage. The objective considered is the minimisation of the total completion time. Since the NP-hard nature of this problem is well-established, mos...

This article presents a rigorous prospective analysis of the impact of Inventory Record Inaccuracy (IRI) on complex multi-echelon Supply Chains (SCs). Specifically, key operational factors (i.e., the magnitude of the error, frequency of the inventory audits and lead time variability) and SC structure are systematically assessed. We find that the de...

In this paper we present a beam-search-based constructive heuristic to solve the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with total flowtime minimisation as objective. This well-known problem is NP-hard, and several heuristics have been developed in the literature. The proposed algorithm is inspired in the logic of the beam search, although it rema...

The permutation flowshop problem is a classic machine scheduling problem where n jobs must be processed on a set of m machines disposed in series and where each job must visit all machines in the same order. Many production scheduling problems resemble flowshops and hence it has generated much interest and had a big impact in the field, resulting i...

In this paper, we study a customer order scheduling problem where a number of orders, composed of several product types, have to be scheduled on a set of parallel machines, each one capable to process a single product type. The objective is to minimise the sum of the completion times of the orders, which is related to the lead time perceived by the...

Recent works have shown that the dynamic performance (i.e., the so-called bullwhip effect) of serial and divergent Supply Chain Networks (SCNs) under a sudden increase in the average customer demand may be substantially different. However, the effect of customer demand variability has not been investigated despite the fact that, in real-world busin...

The Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Makespan objective (PFSP-M) is known to be NP-hard for more than two machines, and literally hundreds of works in the last decades have proposed exact and approximate algorithms to solve it. These works—of computational/experimental nature—show that the PFSP-M is also empirically hard, in the sense t...

Computer-based manufacturing scheduling tools can play a key role in the management of industrial operations, as obtaining economic and reliable schedules is at the core of excellence in customer service and of efficiency in manufacturing companies. As a consequence, this topic has been receiving an increasing interest in the last decades, resultin...