Recent developments in manufacturing processes have increased the role of
just-in-time production systems. Just-in-time production leads to highly
coordinated manufacturing processes, continuous flow of products between
work stations, and reduced storage capacities in the shop floor. In this book,
Silvia Heitmann investigates job-shop problems where limited capacity buffers
to store jobs in non-processing periods are present. Besides a general
buffer model, also specific configurations are considered. The key issue to
develop fast heuristics for the job-shop problem with buffers is to find a...