An efficient heuristic for scheduling in a flowshop to minimize total weighted flowtime of jobs

• Published in: European journal of operational research Vol. 103; no. 1; pp. 129 - 138
• Main Authors: Rajendran, Chandrasekharan, Ziegler, Hans
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 16-11-1997; Elsevier; Elsevier Sequoia S.A
• Series: European Journal of Operational Research
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer based modeling; Exact sciences and technology; Heuristic; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Operations research; Scheduling; Scheduling, sequencing; Studies; Lower bound; Minimum time; Heuristic method; Flow shop; Scheduling; Performance analysis; Algorithm; Comparative study; Completion time
• ISSN: 0377-2217; 1872-6860
• DOI: 10.1016/S0377-2217(96)00273-1

The problem of scheduling in a flowshop is considered with the objective of minimizing the total weighted flowtime of jobs. A heuristic algorithm is developed by the introduction of lower bounds on the completion times of jobs and the development of heuristic preference relations for the scheduling problem under study. An improvement scheme is incorporated in the heuristic to enhance the quality of its solution. The proposed heuristic, with and without the improvement scheme, and the existing heuristics are evaluated by a large number of randomly generated problems. The results of an extensive computational investigation for various problem sizes are presented. It has been observed that both versions of the proposed heuristic perform better than the existing heuristics in giving a superior solution quality and that the proposed heuristic without the improvement scheme yields a good solution by requiring a negligible CPU time. In addition, an experimental investigation is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the improvement scheme when implemented in the proposed heuristic and the existing heuristics, as well as the effectiveness of a variant of the scheme. The results are also discussed.