Efficient heuristic algorithm for scheduling two-stage hybrid flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times

Abstract

We propose an efficient heuristic algorithm for two-stage hybrid flowshop scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times. In the past, metaheuristic approaches, which usually need long time, have been mostly used for the problem. In this study, due to practical reasons of the application that we consider, we need to obtain the solution of the problem within a reasonably short computational time, even for large-sized problems. In this study, we devise the proposed algorithm as a hybrid of two methods, that is, the beam search and NEH method, and we compare the performances with other existing local search methods. The results of the computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm solves the problems in a relatively shorter computation time, while the scheduling performances are superior to the existing methods.