Methodology To Develop Heuristic For Re-Entrant Flow Shop With Two Potential Dominant Machines Using Bottleneck Approach

This paper presents a bottleneck-based methodology to solve scheduling problem of M1,M2,M3,M4,M3,M4 re-entrant flow shop where M1 and M4 have high tendency of being the dominant machines. Two generalised makespan algorithms using bottleneck approach were developed for the identified bottleneck. Each algorithm has specific correction factor which was used to ensure the accuracy of the makespan computation. Using these correction factors, a constructive heuristic was developed to solve for near-optimal scheduling sequence. For small size problems, the heuristic results were compared with the optimum makespan generated from complete enumeration. For medium and large size problems, the heuristic performance was measured by comparing its makespan with the solutions generated by the NEH and lowerbound. At weak and strong dominance level, the heuristic shows good performance against the lowerbound and better results compared to the NEH for large and medium size problems.