Using simulated annealing to schedule a flowshop manufacturing cell with sequence-dependent family setup times

This paper proposes a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic to minimise makespan in a flowshop manufacturing cell with sequence-dependent family setup times. To escape from local minima, Cauchy function - rather than the Boltzmann function - is used during the annealing process. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic is compared against the existing heuristics on a benchmark problem dataset used in earlier studies. These computational results show that the proposed simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic is highly effective as compared to the state-of-the-art meta-heuristics for this problem on the same benchmark instances.