A heuristic algorithm for mean flowtime objective in flowshop scheduling

Based on a job insertion method, a heuristic algorithm is developed to reduce the mean flowtime in a permutation flowshop environment. Simulation experiments are performed to evaluate effectiveness of the proposed algorithm against the existing heuristic methods. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm generates more accurate solutions than other heuristics, especially when ratio of the number of jobs and the number of machines is greater than or equal to two.