A more effective constructive algorithm for permutation flowshop problem

Abstract

NEH (Nawaz et al., 1983) is an effective heuristic for solving the permutation fiowshop problem with the objective of makespan. It includes two phases. PE-VM (Li et al., 2004), which is based on NEH, is analyzed and we conclude that its good performance is partially due to the priority rule it used in phase I. Then, we propose a new measure to solve job insertion ties which may arise in phase II. The measure is based on the idea of balancing the utilization among all machines. Finally, we propose a heuristic NEH-D (NEH based on Deviation), which combines the priority rule of PE-VM and the new measure. Computational results show that the measure is effective and NEH-D is better than PE-VM. There is one parameter in NEH-D, and we design an experiment to try to find a near optimized value of it for tuning the performance of NEH-D. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.