An evaluation of heuristics for scheduling a non‐delay permutation flow shop with family setups to minimize total earliness and tardiness

This paper presents several procedures for developing non‐delay schedules for a permutation flow shop with family setups when the objective is to minimize total earliness and tardiness. These procedures consist of heuristics that were found to be effective for minimizing total tardiness in flow shops without family setups, modified to consider family setups and the total earliness and tardiness objective. These procedures are tested on several problem sets with varying conditions. The results show that variable greedy algorithms are effective when solving small problems, but using a genetic algorithm that includes a neighbourhood defined by the sequence of batches of jobs belonging to the same set‐up family is effective when solving medium‐ or large‐sized problems. The results also show that if setup times can be reduced a significant reduction in total earliness and tardiness could result.