An Iterated Greedy Algorithm for the Hybrid Flowshop Problem with Makespan Criterion

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper is to present some novel constructive heuristics for the the hybrid flowshop scheduling (HFS) problem with the objective of minimizing the makespan for the first time in the literature. We developed the constructive heuristics based the profile fitting heuristic by exploiting the waiting time feature of the HFS problem. In addition we also developed an IG algorithm with a simple insertion based local search for the first time in the literature too. The benchmark suite developed for the HFS problem are used to test the performance of the constructive heuristics and the IG algorithm. The computational results show that constructive heuristics developed were able to further improve the traditional NEH heuristics for the HFS problem with makespan criterion. Furthermore with a very short CPU times of 50nm miliseconds the performance of the IG algorithm was very competitive to the PSO and AIS algorithms that were run for 1600 seconds.