Solving Large-scale FSP with NEH Algorithm Based on Block Properties

To the problem that it is inefficient for current available heuristics solving large-scale flow shop scheduling problems (FSP), an idea of introducing properties of scheduling problem into algorithms was addressed, based on which a new NEH algorithm was proposed. In this paper, block properties of FSP were firstly analyzed and then introduced into NEH algorithm. With block properties, a low bound of partial schedule could be found in O(1), and then a branch and bound method was used to ignore most partial schedules. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can find near-optimal solutions for the large scale FSP in a short time