A better dominance relation and heuristics for Two-Machine No-Wait Flowshops with Maximum Lateness Performance Measure

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a manufacturing system with two-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem where setup times are uncertain. The problem with the performance measure of maximum lateness was addressed in the literature (Computational and Applied Mathematics 37, 6774-6794) where dominance relations were proposed. We establish a new dominance relation and show that the new dominance relation is, on average, about 90$ \% $ more efficient than the existing ones. Moreover, since it is highly unlikely to find optimal solutions for problems of reasonable size by utilizing dominance relations and since there exist no heuristic in the literature for the problem, we propose constructive heuristics to solve real life problems. We conduct extensive computational experiments to evaluate the proposed heuristics. Computational experiments indicate that the performance of the worst proposed heuristic is at least 20$ \% $ better than a benchmark solution. Furthermore, they also indicate that the best proposed heuristic is about 130$ \% $ better than the worst one. The average CPU time of the heuristics is significantly less than a second.