Multi-bottleneck permutation flow-shop scheduling driven by bottleneck

According to the theory of constraints (TOC), bottleneck should be made full use while non-bottleneck should be subordinate to the bottleneck. However, for the multi-bottleneck permutation flow-shop scheduling problem (PFSP), different bottleneck causes different driving force resulting in different even conflicted scheduling solution. Aiming at this problem, the multi-objective mathematical model is given. Then TOC-based bottleneck-driven approach is proposed. For the bottleneck machine, the ant colony algorithm (ACA) is introduced to optimize the bottleneck scheduling. While the backward-forward approach is used to deduce the non-bottleneck´s scheduling. Finally an example with 5 machines and 15 jobs was presented to illustrate the proposed approach and its validity.