A two-phase simulated annealing algorithm to minimise the completion time variance of jobs in flowshops

Abstract

In this paper, simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is employed to solve the flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimising the completion time variance (CTV) of jobs. Four variants of the two-phase SA algorithm (SA-I to SA-IV) are proposed to solve flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimising the CTV of jobs without considering the right shifting of completion time of jobs on the last machine. The proposed SA algorithms have been tested on 90 benchmark flowshop scheduling problems. The solutions yielded by the proposed SA variants are compared with the best CTV of jobs reported in the literature, and the proposed SA-III is found to perform well in minimising the chosen performance measure (CTV) particularly in medium and large size problems.