A New Heuristic Method for the Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

A new heuristic method for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem is presented and compared with two other heuristics named NEH and SPIRIT. The new heuristic method is based on a property of the scheduling problem that provides an upper bound on the idle time of the last machine between any two adjacent jobs regardless of their position in the sequence of jobs. The results from computational experience have shown that the new heuristic outperforms, in solution quality, all others for problems having up to 50 jobs and 30 machines.

Keywords:

• heuristics
• sequencing
• tabu search
• travelling salesman problem