Article history: Received 23 January 2010 Received in revised form 23 April 2010 Accepted 26 April 2010 Available online 26 April 2010 During the past two decades, there have been increasing interests on permutation flow shop with different types of objective functions such as minimizing the makespan, the weighted mean flow-time etc. The permutation flow shop is formulated as a mixed integer pr...

We are interested here in new sub cases for which permutation flow shop schedules are dominant while considering the classical flow shop scheduling problem and the makespan criterion. To obtain these sub cases, we introduce conditions on the lower and upper bounds of the processing times. These conditions can be quite realistic when the corresponding line is balanced.

The Shifting Bottleneck (SB) heuristic is among the most successful approximation methods for solving the Job Shop problem. It is essentially a machine based decomposition procedure where a series of One Machine Sequencing Problems (OMSPs) are solved. However, such a procedure has been reported to be highly ineffective for the Flow Shop problems (Jain and Meeran 2002). In particular, we show th...

In this paper we consider an NP -hard hybrid flow shop problem with machine setups and cycletime minimization. The above issue is an important generalization of a flow-shop problem with minimization of a cycle time, and it stays in a direct relationship with a flexible job shop problem. In the hybrid problem task operations are performed by machines arranged in slots, i.e., a set of machines wi...

This paper presents a new approach of differential evolution to scheduling optimization problem. The developed approach is viewed as an enhanced varient of differential evolution, incorporation new child correction schemas and coversion schemas from differential to discrete domain. The heuristic is extensively evaluated with the scheduling problem of flow shop and compared with published result...

this paper studies the hybrid flow shop scheduling where the optimization criterion is the minimization of total tardiness. first, the problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. then, to solve large problem sizes, an artificial immune algorithm hybridized with a simple local search in form of simulated annealing is proposed. two experiments are carried out to evaluate th...

A discrete bat algorithm (DBA) is proposed for optimal permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP). Firstly, the discrete bat algorithm is constructed based on the idea of basic bat algorithm, which divide whole scheduling problem into many subscheduling problems and then NEH heuristic be introduced to solve subscheduling problem. Secondly, some subsequences are operated with certain probab...

A hybrid flow shop (HFS) is a generalized flow shop with multiple machines in some stages. HFS is fairly common in flexible manufacturing and in process industry. Because manufacturing systems often operate in a stochastic and dynamic environment, dynamic hybrid flow shop scheduling is frequently encountered in practice. This paper proposes a neural network model and algorithm to solve the dyna...

The assumption of classical shop scheduling problems that each job visits each machine only once (Baker, 1974) is often violated in practice. A new type of manufacturing shop, the reentrant shop has recently attracted attention. The basic characteristic of a re-entrant shop is that a job visits certain machines more than once. For example, in semiconductor manufacturing, consequently, each wafe...