An improved NEH-based heuristic for the permutation flowshop problem

NEH is an effective heuristic for solving the permutation flowshop problem with the objective of makespan. It includes two phases: generate an initial sequence and then construct a solution. The initial sequence is studied and a strategy is proposed to solve job insertion ties which may arise in the construct process. The initial sequence which is generated by combining the average processing time of jobs and their standard deviations shows better performance. The proposed strategy is based on the idea of balancing the utilization among all machines. Experiments show that using this strategy can improve the performance of NEH significantly. Based on the above ideas, a heuristic NEH-D (NEH based on Deviation) is proposed, whose time complexity is O(mn2), the same as that of NEH. Computational results on benchmarks show that the NEH-D is significantly better than the original NEH.