Solving the continuous flow-shop scheduling problem by metaheuristics

Continuous flow-shop scheduling problems circumscribe an important class of sequencing problems in the field of production planning. The problem considered here is to find a permutation of jobs to be processed sequentially on a number of machines under the restriction that the processing of each job has to be continuous with respect to the objective of minimizing the total processing time (flow-time). This problem is NPhard. We consider the application of different kinds of metaheuristics from a practical point of view, examining the trade-off between running time and solution quality as well as the knowledge and efforts needed to implement and calibrate the algorithms. Computational results show that high-quality results can be obtained in an efficient way by applying metaheuristics software components with neither the need to understand their inner working nor the necessity to manually tune parameters.