A heuristic for minimizing the makespan in no-idle permutation flow shops

The paper deals with the problem of finding a job sequence that minimizes the makespan in m-machine flow shops under the no-idle condition. This condition requires that each machine must process jobs without any interruption from the start of processing the first job to the completion of processing the last job. Since the problem is NP-hard, we propose a constructive heuristic for solving it that significantly outperforms heuristics known so far.