A New Dominance Relation No-Wait Flowshop Scheduling Problems with Interval Setup Times

Abstract

Minimizing the total completion time (TCT) is essential in numerous manufacturing settings. Since such a problem is considered NP-hard, it is not likely that an optimal solution exists. Accordingly, many papers in scheduling literature look for a dominance relation as a solution to minimizing TCT. Furthermore, due to a wide range of unpredictability in manufacturing settings, it is essential to consider settings with uncertain and bounded setup times. Nonetheless, most of the scheduling literature do not take this uncertainty into account. In this paper, we propose a dominance relation for the problem of minimizing TCT with uncertain and bounded setup times, which is considerably better than the best one in the literature. The percentage of improvement comparing the proposed dominance relation in this paper with the one in scheduling literature is over 1000 %. Hypothesis testing and confidence intervals are also used to further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed dominance relation