A fuzzy greedy heuristic for permutation flow-shop scheduling

This paper describes a polynomial-time heuristic for the permutation flow-shop scheduling problem with the makespan criterion. The proposed method consists of two phases: arranging the jobs in priority order and then constructing a sequence. A fuzzy greedy evaluation function is employed to prioritize the jobs for incorporating into the construction phase of the heuristic. Computational experiments using standard benchmark problems indicate an improvement of the new heuristic over the well-known Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) heuristic. It will be seen that the NEH heuristic is a special case of our more general heuristic.