Rule based heuristic approach for minimizing total flow time in permutation flow shop scheduling

Abstract

Original scientific paper Production scheduling plays a vital role in the planning and operation of a manufacturing system. Better scheduling system has a significant impact on cost reduction and minimum work-in-process inventory. This work considers the problem of scheduling n/m/F/ΣCi using Decision Tree (DT) algorithm. Since this problem is known to be strongly NP-hard, this work proposes heuristic based methodology to solve it. The advantages of DT’s are that the dispatching rule is in the form of If-then else rules which are easily understandable by the shop floor people. The proposed approach is tested on benchmark problems available in the literature and compared. The proposed work is a complement to the traditional methods.