Title: Total completion time minimisation of no-wait flowshop group scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times

Authors: Saeed Behjat; Nasser Salmasi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran ' Corning Incorporated, Wilmington, NC, USA

Abstract: In this research, the no-wait flowshop sequence dependent group scheduling problem with minimisation of total completion time, noted as F_m|nwt, fmls, S_plk|ΣC_j is approached. A mixed integer linear mathematical model is proposed for the research problem. Due to the NP-hard nature of the proposed problem, several metaheuristic algorithms based on particle swarm optimisation and variable neighbourhood search with different neighbourhood search structures are proposed to heuristically solve the problem. Also, an efficient heuristic algorithm is proposed to generate the initial feasible solutions for the proposed algorithms. The performances of the proposed algorithms are compared with each other and the best available one in the literature by using available test problems in the literature. Based on the results, the proposed metaheuristics with structure oriented initial solutions have a better performance than the algorithms with random-generated initial solutions. [Received 14 July 2015; Revised 22 September 2015; Accepted 30 May 2016]

Keywords: no-wait flowshops; group scheduling; total completion time; sequence dependent setup times; mixed integer linear programming; MILP; metaheuristics; flowshop scheduling; mathematical modelling; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; variable neighbourhood search.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2017.081418

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2017 Vol.11 No.1, pp.22 - 48

Published online: 07 Jan 2017 *

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