Heuristic Algorithms for Multistage Flowshop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

This paper describes three heuristic algorithms for seeking a quick and near optimal solution to the n-job M-machine flowshop scheduling problem where jobs are processed on all machines in the same order, and the objective is to minimize either the mean flowtime or the maximum flowtime (make-span). The proposed heuristic algorithms are extensions of the heuristic rules of the author and are comparatively more effective in finding the optimal or near optimal solution to the problem. Computational experience pertaining to the effectiveness of proposed heuristic algorithms is discussed, indicating that the solutions obtained by proposed heuristic algorithms are compared to the Campbell-Dudek-Smith algorithm.