Comparison of initial solutions of heuristics for no-wait flow shop scheduling

Abstract

No-wait flow shop scheduling problems have been proved to be NP-hard. Therefore, heuristics are considered as the most suitable ones for obtaining near optimal solutions and are generally developed in two phases namely, initial solution phase and improvement solution phase. We propose a method for obtaining the initial solution with a view to minimize total flow time. The exhaustive computational results reveal that the proposed method performs better than the existing heuristics with respect to both quality of solution and computational time. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.