No-wait parallel fiowshop scheduling with transfer and setup times

This paper considers a class of parallel flowshop scheduling problem, which is abstracted from the production of seamless steel pipe and characterized by no-wait, transfer times between operations, machine dependent setup times, etc. These characteristics complicate the problem. We formulate it as a large scale mixed integer programming model. We present a transform method to simplify and decrease the scale of the model. A problem specific genetic algorithm is then proposed. We test the performance of six rule scheduling methods and genetic algorithm. The test results show that SPT is the best one of the six rule scheduling methods and the genetic algorithm is better than SPT.