A heuristic algorithm to schedule work in the repair industry

The application of flow shop sequencing to a flow shop generated by organization of a repair shop into modular repair centres is investigated. Such an organization in the repair industry generates processing plans with many zero processing times. The Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) heuristic is shown to give superior schedules according to Cmax but the modified Petrov heuristic gives much better computation times. When a simulation experiment is run to compare the above heuristics on an implementation, the superiority of the NEH heuristic disappears due to the variation of the processing times from the times assumed to develop the schedule.