Modified Heuristics for Scheduling in Flow Shop to Minimize Makespan

Abstract

The NP-completeness of flow shops scheduling problems has been discussed for many years. Hence many heuristics have been proposed to obtain solutions of good quality with a small computational effort. The CDS (Campbell et al) and NEH (Nawaz, Enscore and Ham) heuristics are efficient among meta-heuristics such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA).This paper discusses some methods and suggests new developing to the methods of the scheduling in flow shop to minimize makespan problems. Our main object in this paper, from one side, is to improve efficient heuristics which will be better than the existing heuristics given in the literature and yield solutions within a short time like Simple Heuristic Methods (SHM) and the First Heuristic Decreasing Arrange (DR). From other side, we apply two local search methods like GA and PSO algorithms on flow shop problems.Experimental analysis has been given of the performance of the proposed heuristics and local search methods with the relative efficient existing heuristics.