HEURISTIC FOR THE M-MACHINE NO-WAIT FLOW SHOP SCHEDULING PROBLEM WITH HIERARCHICAL OBJECTIVE

This paper addresses the m-machine no-wait flow shop scheduling problem. Two hierarchical objective functions are considered: (1) minimizing makespan subject to the constraint that mean completion time is less than or equal to a given value; and (2) minimizing total completion time subject to the constraint that makespan is less than or equal to a given value. For each objective, an Iterated Greedy with Local Search (IGLS) algorithm is proposed. Computational experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of IGLS against other heuristics in the literature. The results show that the IGLS outperform the other methods in both effectiveness and efficiency.