Biography: F.J. Hwang is the Senior Lecturer of Operational Research at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney. F.J. is the winner of the 2017 Albert Nelson Marquis Achievement Award. He was elected to the membership of the Phi-Tau-Phi Scholastic Honor Society twice. His research interests center around production optimization, management information sciences, big data, computational intelligence, and logistics management. F.J. has published in the leading journals, including Annals of Operations Research, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Computers & Operations Research, Discrete Optimization, IEEE Access, Journal of Scheduling, and Journal of the Operational Research Society.

Topic: An Overview on Flexible Flowshop Manufacturing with Dedicated Machines

Abstract: The two-stage flexible flowshops with dedicated machines (F2DM) manufacturing problems arise naturally from practical production and fabrication systems. F2DM scheduling problems are classified into two categories, whose machine settings are antithetical to each other. In model 1,a single common bottleneck machine is installed at stage 1 and m parallel dedicated machines comprise stage 2. The second model has the m dedicated machines at stage 1 and the bottleneck machine at stage 2. Categorizing the literature according to the performance metrics, we survey the existing research results of the two models and propose several new solution procedures with improved computational complexity. The complexity results are summarized, and suggestions coupled with perspectives are made for future research.