An improved heuristic for no-wait flow shop to minimize makespan. (July 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ye, Honghan; Li, Wei; Abedini, Amin
• Is Part Of: Journal of manufacturing systems. Volume 44:Part 2(2017)
• Page Start: 273
• Page End: 279
• Publication Date: 2017-07
• Subjects: Computational complexity -- Heuristics -- Makespan -- No-wait flow shop; Manufacturing processes -- Periodicals; Production engineering -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Robots, Industrial -- Periodicals; Production, Technique de la -- Informatique -- Périodiques; Robots industriels -- Périodiques; Electronic journals; 670.42
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmsy.2017.04.007
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0278-6125

Abstract

Abstract: No-wait flow shop production has been widely applied in manufacturing, where no waiting time is allowed between intermediate operations. However, minimization of makespan for no-wait flow shop production is NP -hard. In this paper, we propose an average idle time (AIT) heuristic to minimize makespan in no-wait flow shop production. First, we take the current idle times and future idle times into consideration, proposing an initial sequence algorithm, and then use the insertion and neighborhood exchanging methods to further improve solutions. Compared with three existing best-known heuristics, our AIT heuristic can achieve the smallest deviations of 0.23% from optimum, based on Taillard's benchmarks and 600 randomly generated instances, in the same computational complexity.