Genetic algorithms for the two-stage bicriteria flowshop problem

This paper considers the two-stage bicriteria flow shop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the total flow time subject to obtaining the optimal makespan. In view of the NP-hard nature of the problem, two Genetic Algorithms (GA) based approaches are proposed to solve the problem. The effectiveness of the proposed GA based approaches is demonstrated by comparing their performance with the only known heuristic for the problem. The computational experiments show that the proposed GA based approaches are effective in solving the problem and recommend that the proposed GA based approaches are useful for solving the multi-machine, multi-criteria scheduling problems.