A Comparison of Constructive Heuristics with the Objective of Minimizing Makespan in the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem

We propose a constructive heuristic approach for the solution of the permutation flow-shop problem. The objective function of all algorithms is the minimization of the makespan. Our approach employs Johnson’s rule to give a good initial solution for the improvement heuristic, also known as metaheuristics. The proposed heuristic algorithm, named MOD, is tested against four other heuristics that are well-known from the open literature, namely, NEH, Palmer’s Slope Index, CDS and Gupta’s algorithm. The computational experiment itself contains 120 benchmark problem data sets proposed by Taillard. We compare our results to the solutions represented by NEH outputs. The computational experiment shows that the proposed algorithm is a feasible alternative for practical application when solving n-job and m-machine in flow-shop scheduling problems to give relatively good solutions in a short-time interval.