Heuristic rules for tardiness problem in flow shop with intermediate due dates

Abstract

In this paper, the tardiness flow shop models with intermediate due date were considered. The flow shop models consist of a set of jobs each having a number of operations, while each operation is performed in a single machine. All the jobs are considered having the same unidirectional precedence order. In the tardiness flow shop models with intermediate due date, which we call the generalized tardiness flow shop models, there exist a due date associated with the completion of each operation, and we want to find a schedule which minimizes the total tardiness of the jobs. This is a more general version of tardiness flow shop in the sense that, by assigning a large value to each of the intermediate due dates, we can obtain the traditional flow shop models. Considering the generalized tardiness flow shop models as the NP-hard problems, a set heuristic sequencing rules for finding the best permutation schedule for such problems is proposed. We conducted an extensive computational experiment using randomly generated test problems for evaluating the efficiency of the proposed rules in obtaining a near-optimal solution. The efficiency of the rules was evaluated, and those rules with better solutions were designated and reported.