Efficient constructive procedures for the distributed blocking flow shop scheduling problem

The distributed blocking flow shop scheduling problem (DBFSP) allows modeling of the scheduling process in companies with more than one factory, with productive systems configured as flow shop lines where the blocking constraint has to be considered. To the best of our knowledge, this variant of the distributed permutation flow shop scheduling problem has not been studied. In this paper, we propose some constructive heuristics that will solve the DBFSP and thus minimize the maximum completion time among the factories. The proposed procedures use two approaches that are totally different from those proposed for the distributed permutation flow shop scheduling problem (DPFSP). By taking the DPFSP procedures that we adapted to DBFSP and comparing them to the new approaches that were specifically designed for DBPFSP, we find that the latter perform considerably better.