Title: A modified rapid access heuristic for flowshop scheduling problem

Authors: Ning Wang, Reinaldo J. Moraga, Omar Ghrayeb

Addresses: Arizona State University, 699 S. Mill Ave. Tempe AZ 85281, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, Northern Illinois University, 590 Garden Road, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, Northern Illinois University, 590 Garden Road, USA

Abstract: This paper presents a modified rapid access (MRA) heuristic to solve the flowshop scheduling problems. This new heuristic follows the fundamental idea of the original rapid access approach by forming a two-machine subproblem, but the processing times are determined by using an exponential weighting modifier for the original linear weighting scheme without additional computational effort, then the subproblem is solved by using Johnson|s two-machine algorithm. The performance of MRA is tested using instances from the literature and compared with the performance of the original rapid access (RA). Results show that the MRA outperforms the original RA in large size problems by using specific value of parameter alpha. Factorial experiment and response surface methodology are applied to determine the best alpha value which is the main factor that impacts the performance of MRA and produce the best performance of the MRA heuristic.

Keywords: flowshop scheduling; makespan; rapid access heuristics; response surface methodology; RSM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2011.042948

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2011 Vol.3 No.4, pp.327 - 340

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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