Dispatching Rules-based Optimization of the No-wait Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

To improve the productivity of the flow shop, this paper proposes a new mathematical model to describe the scheduling problem of the no-wait flow shop (NWFS) with the minimization makespan as the scheduling objective. In addition, a new dispatching rule PCA-AS is created using the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm, and PCA-AS is applied to the process of solving the scheduling problem to gain a scheduling strategy with excellent performance. Finally, the paper numerically verifies that PCA-AS outperforms the shortest processing time (SPT) dispatching rule and the first-in-first-out (FIFO) dispatching rule in minimizing the makespan.