Flowshop scheduling is a very active research area. This problem still attracts a considerable amount of interest despite the sheer amount of available results. Total flowtime minimization of a flowshop has been actively studied and many effective algorithms have been proposed in the last few years. New best solutions have been found for common benchmarks at a rapid pace. However, these improve...

The general flowshop scheduling problem is a production problem where a set of n jobs have to be processed with identical flow pattern on m machines. In permutation flowshops the sequence of jobs is the same on all machines. A significant research effort has been devoted for sequencing jobs in a flowshop minimizing the makespan. This paper describes the application of a Constructive Genetic Alg...

This paper studies the problem of production scheduling in a company belonging to the apparel industry, where textile labels are manufactured through the process of thermal transfer. The problem is modelled as a flexible flowshop with two stages. The objectives are the maximisation of system productivity (or minimisation of makespan) and the minimisation of the number of production orders with ...

This study considers the throughput optimization in a two-machine flowshop producing identical jobs. Unlike the general trend in the scheduling literature, the machines are assumed to be capable of performing different operations. As a consequence, one of the three operations that a job requires can only be processed by the first and another operation can only be processed by the second machine...

In this paper, we propose three new metaheuristic implementations to address the problem of minimizing the makespan in a hybrid flexible flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times. The first metaheuristic is a genetic algorithm (GA) embedding two new crossover operators, and the second is an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm which incorporates a transition rule featuring lookahead infor...

this paper deals with a bi-objective hybrid no-wait flowshop scheduling problem minimizing the makespan and total weighted tardiness, in which we consider transportation times between stages. obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. this paper presen...

Scheduling in chemical flowshops is one of a number of important industrial problems which are potentially amenable to solution using the genetic algorithm. However the problem is not trivial: flowshops run continuously, and for efficient operation those controlling them must be able to adjust the order in which products are made as new requests are received. In addition, there are in principle...

Solving efficiently complex problems using metaheuristics, and in particular local search algorithms, requires incorporating knowledge about the problem to solve. In this paper, the permutation flowshop problem is studied. It is well known that in such problems, several solutions may have the same fitness value. As this neutrality property is an important issue, it should be taken into account ...