Scheduling heuristic for the n-job m-machine flow shop

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling jobs in a flow shop manufacturing environment. A heuristic approach is developed for determining a priority sequence for the jobs with a view to minimizing total time to complete all the jobs. The approach is based on minimizing idle time on the last machine. The procedure is tested computationally and compared with the best known heuristic for flow shop sequencing. The proposed procedure demonstrates superior performance on larger problems, both in terms of quality of the solution and execution speed.