Efficient Heuristics for Flowshop Scheduling for Minimizing the Makespan and Total Flowtime of Jobs

The problem of scheduling in permutation flowshops has been extensively investigated by many researchers. Recently, attempts are being made to consider more than one objective simultaneously and develop algorithms to obtain a set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Varadharajan et al. (2005) presented a multi-objective simulated-annealing algorithm (MOSA) for the problem of permutation-flowshop scheduling with the objectives of minimizing the makespan and the total flowtime of jobs. The MOSA uses two initial sequences obtained using heuristics, and seeks to obtain non-dominated solutions through the implementation of a probability function, which probabilistically selects the objective of minimizing either the makespan or the total flowtime of jobs. In this paper, the same problem of heuristically developing non-dominated sequences is considered. We propose an effective heuristics based on simulated annealing (SA), in which the weighted sum of the makespan and the total flowtime is used. The essences of the heuristics are in selecting the initial sequence, setting the weight and generating a solution in the search process. Using a benchmark problem provided by Taillard (1993), which was used in the MOSA, these conditions are extracted in a large-scale experiment. The non-dominated sets obtained from the existing algorithms and the proposed heuristics are compared. It was found that the proposed heuristics drastically improved the performance of finding the non-dominated frontier.