Title: A new heuristic for flow shop scheduling problems minimising system utilisation time subject to minimum makespan

Authors: Meenakshi Sharma; Manisha Sharma; Sameer Sharma

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India ' Department of Mathematics, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India ' Department of Mathematics, D.A.V. College Jalandhar, Punjab, India

Abstract: This paper presents a heuristic algorithm to solve flow shop scheduling problems (FSSP) with the criterion to minimise the system utilisation time with minimum of maximum completion time (makespan). The proposed algorithm can solve FSSP under both the constraints in all the situations, which to the best of our knowledge has never been studied previously to this extent. To investigate the performance of the proposed heuristic and to compare it with some constructive benchmark heuristics, a number of test problems are solved and the results are reported. Computational results demonstrate that the newly developed heuristic significantly outperforms the other constructive heuristics reported in the literature in terms of solution quality.

Keywords: flow shop scheduling; makespan; delay time; heuristic; utilisation time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2021.118984

International Journal of Operational Research, 2021 Vol.42 No.2, pp.190 - 228

Received: 06 Mar 2018
Accepted: 30 May 2019
Published online: 16 Nov 2021 *

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