An Efficient Method for No-Wait Flow Shop Scheduling to Minimize Makespan

In this paper, an objective increment method is introduced for no-wait flow shops with makespan minimization, which can calculate makespan of a new schedule directly from that of its parent and can judge whether the new schedule is better than its parent or not. Specific makespan increments are analyzed for insertion and pair-wise exchange, two fundamental operations in most heuristics for flow shops. Moreover, a composite heuristic based on makespan increment is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposal outperforms the best existing algorithms SA2, RAJ and GR for the problem considered and it needs minimal CPU time among the four compared algorithms, which implies that the proposal is desirable for large-scale no-wait flow shops in practical manufacturing systems