Modeling and Scheduling of Cyclic Shops with Time Window Constraints

A cyclic shop is a production system that repeatedly produces identical sets of jobs, called minimal part sets, in the same loading and processing sequence. We consider a version of cyclic shop where the operations are processed and unloaded within time limits, so called a time window. We model the shop using an event graph model, a class of Petri nets. To represent the time window constraint, we introduce places with negative time delays. From the shop modeling graph, we develop a linear system model based on the max- plus algebra and characterize the conditions on the existence of a stable schedule.