A tabu search approach for the flow shop group scheduling problem

The scheduling problem in CMS has been named flow shop group scheduling which is consist of two interrelated problems, namely intra-group scheduling and inter-group scheduling. The sequence of jobs for each group; which is obtained by intra-group scheduling stage is followed by inter-group scheduling through which the sequence of group is identified. In this paper the tabu search approach developed for each stage separately. To test the performance of proposed algorithm, computational experiments are conducted on the 180 randomly generated problems classified under 27 categories of problems. Computational results demonstrate significant reduction in the average makespan. The effectiveness of the proposed tabu search approach is also explored and compared with SVS algorithm for solving the flow shop group scheduling problem.