A Novel Constructive Heuristic for Flowshop Group Scheduling Problems to Minimize Total Flow Time

Abstract

Due to the extensive applications of the flowshop sequence-dependent group scheduling problem(FSDGSP), especially in the manufacturing industry, there has been a growing interest in the research of it. In this paper, a constructive heuristic called JPALRx is proposed for solving FSDGSP with total flow time criterion. In the JPALRx, a sequence of part families is determined by a jigsaw puzzle inspired algorithm considering major family setup times. Afterwards, a job sequence within each part family is obtained by using a heuristic algorithm called LRx. Furthermore, an insert operator based on family is used to further improve the quality of the solution obtained. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of JPALRx.