Title: Development of a heuristic for no-wait flowshop production process to minimise makespan

Authors: Azahar Alam; Chandan Bhar

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India

Abstract: The no-wait flow shop production system has much practical application in manufacturing industries. Minimisation total completion time of the no-wait flow shop comes under the NP-complete category. Consequently, getting effective and efficient quality of results for such types of problems is a challenge where effective means optimal or near-optimal solutions and efficient means, which took less computational time. A heuristic is proposed for the problem under consideration, in which the problem is getting solved in two phases. The first phase is the initial sequence generation, and the second one is the improvement phase. Proposed heuristic is compared with four best-known heuristics, and for the smaller size problem, an exhaustive enumeration is used to check the performance of the heuristic. Moreover, heuristic performance is tested over 600 randomly generated problems of different sizes. For large size problems, it showed that the proposed heuristic is very much efficient.

Keywords: heuristic; no-wait flowshop problem; makespan minimisation; computational complexity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2022.125719

International Journal of Operational Research, 2022 Vol.45 No.1, pp.68 - 85

Received: 29 Oct 2019
Accepted: 27 Dec 2019
Published online: 27 Sep 2022 *

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