Mathematical Models for No-Wait Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problems

Abstract

In today's complex manufacturing industry no-wait permutation flowshop scheduling problems are one of the most encountered types of scheduling problems. The floor configuration of this type is the one with the restriction over the jobs that cannot wait between successive machines. The problem can be modeled from different points of view on the floor configuration. Hence in this study three mixed-integer programming models and two constraint programming models are studied on the no-wait permutation flowshop scheduling problems for the three objective functions: makespan total flow time and total tardiness. Among five mathematical models two are newly proposed to the literature on no-wait flowshop scheduling problems and three are previously studied for the variants of the no-wait flowshop scheduling problems. Complete experimentation is accomplished on the well-known benchmark set of Taillard. Regarding the computational experiments Model 4 performs best regarding the objective function value and the gap percentage reported in makespan and total flow time minimization. However for total tardiness although Model 3 performs best in terms of the gap percentage reported Model 4 still performs best in terms of the objective value reported. © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.