This paper aims to study a real case of an optimization problem derived from a hospital supply chain. The present work focuses on developing operational decision support models and algorithms for production process scheduling in hospital catering. The addressed production system is considered as a flexible job shop system. The objective is to minimize the total flow time. A novel mathematical model and two metaheuristics for the production scheduling of multi-product and multi-stage food

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... es are developed. These methods have proven their effectiveness for the scheduling of operations of the food production processes and allowed significant improvements in the performance of the studied production system.