Heuristic algorithm for scheduling in a flowshop to minimize total flowtime

In this article, a heuristic algorithm is presented for scheduling in a flowshop to minimize the total flowtime of jobs. A heuristic preference relation is developed and used as the basis for job insertion to build up the complete schedule. When evaluated over a large number of problems of various sizes, the proposed heuristic is found to be very effective in yielding optimal or near-optimal solutions, and emerges superior to the existing heuristics.