Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling jobs in a no-wait flowshop with the objective of minimising the total completion time. This problem is well-known for being nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, and therefore, most contributions to the topic focus on developing algorithms able to obtain good approximate solutions for the problem in a short CPU time. More specifically, there are various constructive heuristics available for the problem [such as the ones by Rajendran and Chaudhuri (Nav Res Logist 37:695–705, 1990); Bertolissi (J Mater Process Technol 107:459–465, 2000), Aldowaisan and Allahverdi (Omega 32:345–352, 2004) and the Chins heuristic by Fink and Voβ (Eur J Operat Res 151:400–414, 2003)], as well as a successful local search procedure (Pilot-1-Chins). We propose a new constructive heuristic based on an analogy with the two-machine problem in order to select the candidate to be appended in the partial schedule. The myopic behaviour of the heuristic is tempered by exploring the neighbourhood of the so-obtained partial schedules. The computational results indicate that the proposed heuristic outperforms existing ones in terms of quality of the solution obtained and equals the performance of the time-consuming Pilot-1-Chins.
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Framinan, J.M., Nagano, M.S. & Moccellin, J.V. An efficient heuristic for total flowtime minimisation in no-wait flowshops. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 46, 1049–1057 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-009-2154-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-009-2154-0