Total completion time minimisation of no-wait flowshop group scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times

In this research, the no-wait flowshop sequence dependent group scheduling problem with minimisation of total completion time, noted as Fm|nwt, fmls, Splk|ΣCj is approached. A mixed integer linear mathematical model is proposed for the research problem. Due to the NP-hard nature of the proposed problem, several metaheuristic algorithms based on particle swarm optimisation and variable neighbourhood search with different neighbourhood search structures are proposed to heuristically solve the problem. Also, an efficient heuristic algorithm is proposed to generate the initial feasible solutions for the proposed algorithms. The performances of the proposed algorithms are compared with each other and the best available one in the literature by using available test problems in the literature. Based on the results, the proposed metaheuristics with structure oriented initial solutions have a better performance than the algorithms with random-generated initial solutions. [Received 14 July 2015; Revised 22 September 2015; Accepted 30 May 2016]