A two-stage iterated greedy algorithm and a multi-objective constructive heuristic for the mixed no-idle flowshop scheduling problem to minimize makespan subject to total completion time

Abstract

Advanced production systems usually are complex in nature and aim to deal with multiple performance measures simultaneously. Therefore, in most cases, the consideration of a single objective function is not sufficient to properly solve scheduling problems. This paper investigates the multi-objective mixed no-idle flowshop scheduling problem. The addressed optimization case is minimizing makespan subject to an upper bound on total completion time. To solve this problem, we proposed a two-stage iterated greedy and a multi-objective constructive heuristic. Moreover, we developed a new multi-objective improvement procedure focusing on increasing the performance of the developed methods in solving the addressed problem. and a new initialization procedure. We performed several computational tests in order to compare our developed methods with the main algorithms from similar scheduling problems in the literature. It was revealed that the proposed approaches give the best results compared with other state-of-the-art performing methods.