Hybrid heuristic for m-machine no-wait flowshops to minimize total completion time

Abstract

No-wait flowshops circumscribe an important class of sequencing problems in the field of production planning. For no-wait flowshops with total completion time minimization, a permutation of jobs should be find to be processed sequentially on a number of machines under the restriction that each job is processed continuously. This is a typical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, a new hybrid heuristic algorithm is proposed which is based on PH1p algorithm. PH1p is modified by replacing Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) insertion operator with FL method. A composite algorithm is adopted to generate an advantageous initial seed. Based on well-known benchmarks and comparisons with some existing algorithms, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid algorithm. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.