Article ID: | iaor20113130 |
Volume: | 60 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 426 |
End Page Number: | 432 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2011 |
Journal: | Computers & Industrial Engineering |
Authors: | Liao Li-Man, Huang Ching-Jen |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search, programming: integer |
Batch processing machines are frequently encountered in many industrial environments. A batch processing machine is one which can process several jobs simultaneously as a batch. The processing time of a batch is equal to the largest processing time of any job in the batch. This study deals with the problem of scheduling jobs in a flowshop with two batch processing machines such that the makespan is minimized. A heuristic based on Tabu search (TS) technique is proposed. The proposed heuristic is compared with a heuristic based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP). Because the complexity of the MILP‐based heuristic is depended on the number of job batches, the comparison is under up‐to‐eight batches problem. In order to measure the proposed TS‐based heuristic in larger batch problem, the relative error percentage with the lower bound (REP