Algorithms for a realistic variant of flowshop scheduling

This paper deals with a realistic variant of flowshop scheduling, namely the hybrid flexible flowshop. A hybrid flowshop mixes the characteristics of regular flowshops and parallel machine problems by considering stages with parallel machines instead of having one single machine per stage. We also investigate the flexible version where stage skipping might occur, i.e., not all stages must be visited by all jobs. Lastly, we also consider job sequence dependent setup times per stage. The optimization criterion considered is makespan minimization. While many approaches for hybrid flowshops have been proposed, hybrid flexible flowshops have been rarely studied. The situation is even worse with the addition of sequence dependent setups. In this study, we propose two advanced algorithms that specifically deal with the flexible and setup characteristics of this problem. The first algorithm is a dynamic dispatching rule heuristic, and the second is an iterated local search metaheuristic. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by comparison against seven other high performing existing algorithms. The statistically sound results support the idea that the proposed algorithms are very competitive for the studied problem. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.