Web Service Based Method for Large Scale Flow Shops with Flowtime Minimization

In this paper, a Web Service based method is presented to conduct parallelized operations in an algorithm on multiple computers. Parallelizable operations in a constructive heuristic for flow shop scheduling problem with total flowtime minimization are analyzed. A parallel heuristic for the problem is described and its parameters are analyzed in theory. The proposed parallel heuristic is compared with the corresponding centralized one. Experimental results show that the proposed method can substantially increase efficiency.