New benchmark algorithms for No-wait Flowshop Group Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times

Setup operations and waiting time between production procedures are prime examples of non-value-adding activities that can be alleviated through well-informed production decisions. Application of the No-wait Flowshop Group Scheduling Problems with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times (NWFGSP_SDST) as an optimization tool helps maintain the setup and waiting times at their minimum when optimizing advanced production systems. This research contributes to the understudied literature of Group Scheduling Problems (GSP), developing two metaheuristics, a Revised Multi-start Simulated Annealing (RMSA) and a local search-based variant (RMSA(LS)), to solve the NWFGSP_SDST problem. Yielding the best-found solution in more than 99.7 percent of the benchmark instances, it is shown that RMSA is superior to the existing state-of-the-art algorithms developed to solve the NWFGSP_SDST problem. Besides, about 80 percent of the best-found solutions were further improved by RMSA(LS) with the statistical analysis confirming that RMSA(LS) reduced the total completion time obtained by RMSA at the expense of longer computational time. Overall, this research explored scheduling as an operational strategic tool facilitating lean production. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.