Heuristic approaches for n/m/F/&Sgr;Ci scheduling problems

In this paper, we address the flow shop scheduling problem, with the criterion of minimizing the sum of job completion times. Two heuristic approaches are proposed to deal with this problem. The first approach focuses on reducing machine idle times and the second one puts efforts on reducing both the machine idle times and the job queue times. The computation of a variety of numerical cases demonstrates that the heuristic approaches are quite efficient in finding the desirable solutions.