An improved iterated greedy algorithm for the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion

An improved iterated greedy algorithm (IIGA) is proposed in this paper to solve the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with the objective to minimize the makespan. In the proposed IIGA, firstly, a speed-up method for the insert neighborhood is developed to evaluate the whole insert neighborhood of a single solution with (n − 1)2 neighbors in time O(n2), where n is the number of jobs; secondly, an improved Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is presented for constructing solutions in the initial stage and searching process; thirdly, a simple local search algorithm based on the speed-up method is incorporated into the iterated greedy algorithm to perform exploitation. The computational results based on some well-known benchmarks show that the proposed IIGA can obtain results better than those from some existing approaches in the literature.