Simple constructive heuristics for the Distributed Assembly Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem with sequence dependent setup times

In this paper we consider a realistic production setting, referred to the Distributed Assembly Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem or DAPFSP in short. The problem consists of two stages, production and assembly. The paper is an extension of the recent work by Hatami et al. [6], that the additional consideration of sequence-dependent setup times (SDST) is added on both production and assembly stages. The resulting problem is very close to the reality of multi-factory scheduling. The production stage as the first stage is composed of f identical flowshop production factories where each factory is a flowshop that produce the different jobs. In the assembly stage, all produced jobs are assembled into final products. The objective is to minimize the overall makespan. As this problem is known to be NP-hard, we propose two simple constructive heuristics to solve the problem. In this paper we detail the proposed heuristics and carry out a comprehensive computational and statistical experiment to analyze their performance.