A fuzzy heuristic algorithm for the flow shop scheduling problem

The two-machine flow shop problem with the objective of minimizing makespan that is known as Johnson problem is now standard fundamental in the theory of scheduling. We generalize Johnson’s results for more than two machine problems, using a fuzzy heuristic algorithm. Performance of the new algorithm is analyzed with some numerical examples. To evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic, we have used it on some small size problems and the results are compared with optimum scheduling. Notice that scheduling the problems with large sizes, is NP hard.