A NEW HEURISTIC FOR THE N-JOB, M-MACHINE FLOWSHOP PROBLEM

This paper describes a new improvement heuristic for solving the flow-shop scheduling problem. This new method minimizes gaps between successive operations in solutions generated by other heuristics. We compare the new heuristic with five well-known heuristics and the random case by using simulation with makespan, mean flow time and mean utilization as the performance measures. The simulation results show that the new heuristic improves the best heuristic in the three measures by a significant percentage, while the increase in CPU time is modest.