An experimental evaluation of heuristics for scheduling in a real-life flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times of jobs

This paper deals with the development and evaluation of heuristics for scheduling in a real-life flowshop. The case study differs from the conventional flowshop scheduling problem in that the setup times of jobs are separated from process times and are sequence-dependent. We present a heuristic algorithm that makes use of simulated annealing (SA) technique. We also present a perturbation scheme in the SA algorithm. The proposed and existing heuristics are evaluated for scheduling to minimize the maximum weighted tardiness of a job and total weighted tardiness of jobs. The results of the computational evaluation reveal that the proposed heuristic performs much better than the existing ones.