The two-stage hybrid flow shop problem with dedicated machines under release dates and delivery times

Abstract

The hybrid flow shop scheduling problem has been extensively examined where the main objective has been to improve production efficiency. However, for contemporary manufacturing firms, the due date related performance has gained a significant managerial importance in real life production. Therefore, in this study we consider the integration of both release dates and delivery times for the jobs. We develop several lower bounds and five heuristics. We also implement and test different variants of tabu search. An extensive computational study shows that the proposed methods yield good results within moderate CPU time.