Scheduling a manufacturing process with restrictions on resource availability

This paper examines the scheduling of a drug packaging operation which requires assigning resources to production lines during set-up in order to satisfy product specifications. We present mixed integer programming models of the problem and develop a Lagrangian heuristic to solve the models. Real data from a drug company and randomly generated data are used to test the models. Results show the efficacy of our solution approach to find good feasible schedules. We discuss some of the practical benefits and potential issues about the production schedules obtained using the models.