NEW HEURISTICS FOR THE NO-WAIT FLOWSHOP WITH SEQUENCE-DEPENDENT SETUP TIMES PROBLEM

Daniella Castro Araújo,Marcelo Seido Nagano

doi:10.14488/bjopm.2015.v12.n2.a1

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling jobs in a no-wait flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times with the objective of minimizing the makespan and the total flowtime. As this problem is well-known for being NP-hard, we present two new constructive heuristics in order to obtain good approximate solutions for the problem in a short CPU time, named GAPH and QUARTS. GAPH is based on a structural property for minimizing makespan and QUARTS breaks the problem in quartets in order to minimize the total flowtime. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approachs over three of the best-know methods in the literature: BAH and BIH, from Bianco, Dell´Olmo and Giordani (1999) and TRIPS, by Brown, McGarvey and Ventura (2004).

Highlights

The first systematic approach to scheduling problems was undertaken in the mid-1950s
Treating setup times separately from processing times allows operations to be performed simultaneously and improves resource utilization. This is, in particular, important in modern production management systems such as just-in-time (JIT), optimized production technology (OPT), group technology (GT), cellular manufacturing (CM), and time-based competition (ALLAHVERDI et al, 2008). Another important area in scheduling arises in no-wait flow shop problems (NWFSP), where jobs have to be processed without interruption between consecutive machines
We propose two new heuristic methods for the problem, GAPH and QUARTS, in order to minimize the make span and the total flow time, respectively

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The first systematic approach to scheduling problems was undertaken in the mid-1950s. The NWFSP with sequence dependent setup times with the objective of minimizing make span was first proposed by Bianco et al,(1999) They showed how to reduce this problem to the asymmetric travelling salesman problem (ATSP) and presented two lower bounds and two heuristics, named BAH and BIH. Brown et al, (2004) presented a non-polynomial time solution method and a heuristic named TRIPS for the NWFSP with sequence independent setup times, considering for the performance measures both the total flow time problems, and showed that their algorithms performed better than GA and HGA. Ruiz et Allahverdi (2007b) proposed seven heuristics and four genetic algorithms for the NWFSP with sequence independent setup times in order to minimize the maximum lateness. Step 2.4: h h+1; Step 3: Assign and respectively, of

A STRUCTURAL PROPERTY FOR THE NEW HEURISTIC FOR MAKESPAN

Findings

CONCLUSION