A two-phase heuristic approach to the permutation flow-shop scheduling problem

In this study, the permutation flow-shop scheduling problem is considered. One of the established heuristic methods for the single machine scheduling problem is modified and extended to provide a solution method for the permutation flow-shop problem. The solution methodology consists of two phases. In the first phase an initial job sequence is generated using one of the available well known, and efficient heuristics, while in the second phase the sequence generated is improved in terms of the makespan using a pair exchange mechanism with directionality constraint.