A heuristic for scheduling in flowshop and flowline-based manufacturing cell with multi-criteria

The problem of scheduling in flowshop and fiowline-based manufacturing cell is considered with the bicriteria of minimizing makespan and total flowtime of jobs. The formulation of the scheduling problems for both the flowshop and the flowline-based manufacturing cell is first discussed. The paper then presents the development of the proposed heuristic for flowshop scheduling. A heuristic preference relation is developed as the basis for the heuristic so that only the potential job interchanges are checked for possible improvement with respect to bicriteria. The proposed heuristic algorithm as well as the existing heuristic are evaluated in a large number of randomly generated large-sized flowshop problems. The paper also investigates the effectiveness of these heuristics with respect to the objective of minimizing total machine idletime. It then modifies the proposed heuristic for scheduling in a cell, and evaluates its performance.