A heuristic and meta-heuristic based on problem-specific knowledge for distributed blocking flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times

The distributed production scenario with the sequence-dependent setup times (SDST) widely exists in the modern manufacturing system. This paper investigates the distributed blocking flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times (SDST/DBFSP). Considering the complexity of the distributed scenario and SDSTs, a discrete heuristic and meta-heuristic is proposed by exploring the problem-specific knowledge. First, a knowledge-incorporated construction heuristic is proposed to reduce the blocking times and idle times generated by SDSTs. In the first stage of the meta-heuristic, an insertion-based neighborhood operator of different factories is developed to explore promising regions in the decision space. In the second stage, a local search operator is embedded to enhance the exploitation ability. Additionally, a simulated annealing-like acceptance criterion of the iterated greedy algorithm is employed to keep the diversity of the population. Finally, an insertion operation for critical factories is introduced to further improve the accuracy of the solutions. Moreover, a speedup method for the insertion neighborhood is expanded to reduce the computational complexity of SDST/DBFSP. In the part of the experiment, a deconstruction process is designed to gain insight into the contribution of each component in the proposed meta-heuristic. The proposed meta-heuristic is assessed through comparing with five state-of-the-art algorithms to demonstrate its effectiveness. The experimental results testified that the proposed meta-heuristic outperforms other algorithms regarding the significance of the SDST/DBFSP.