A New Hybrid Heuristic for Minimizing Total Flow Time in Permutation Flow Shop

Abstract

The paper addresses an n-job, m-machinery permutation flow shop scheduling problem with minimization of the total flow time objective. We present a new modified version of the heuristic of Woo and Yim and the heuristic of Laha and Sarin, named "WYLS heuristic". Extensive computational experimentation were conducted to examine the performance of the proposed heuristic. Statistically significant represents the LS, proposed, FL, WY and NEH heuristics have equivalent performance, while Gupta's heuristic is the least effective.