A two-level method of production planning and scheduling for bi-objective reentrant hybrid flow shops

•The multi-objective production planning and scheduling is considered.•We propose two-level method for reentrant hybrid flow shops.•The algorithm improves productivity and customer satisfaction.•We compare the proposed algorithm with existing two-level methods.

This research deals with a two-level method of production planning and scheduling problems of the reentrant hybrid flow shops. The hybrid flow shop has serial stages where each stage consists of identical parallel machines. Products can be processed at any one of the parallel machines at a stage in the hybrid flow shop. Also a product may have reentrant operations which require revisits of some stages several times. We consider a two-level hierarchical process on production planning and scheduling of the reentrant hybrid flow shop with the bi-objective function to improve productivity and customer satisfaction. Computational experiments show that the combination of preemptive goal programming based production planning algorithms and Pareto genetic based scheduling algorithms outperforms other two-level algorithms. Also we provide results of the application of the proposed method to both randomly generated problems and a real world Thin Film Transistor and Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) industry.