Title: Minimising total flow time in permutation flow shop scheduling using a simulated annealing-based approach

Authors: Dipak Laha, Uday Kumar Chakraborty

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Calcutta 700032, India. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Missouri St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63121, USA

Abstract: This paper presents an efficient simulated annealing algorithm for minimising the total flow time in n-job, m-machine permutation flow shop scheduling problems. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach is competitive with the best three methods in the flow shop literature. Statistical tests of significance are used to validate the improvement in solution quality.

Keywords: flow shop scheduling; simulated annealing; heuristics; optimisation; TFT; total flow time; permutation flow shops.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAAC.2010.035525

International Journal of Automation and Control, 2010 Vol.4 No.4, pp.359 - 379

Published online: 30 Sep 2010 *

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