General flowshop scheduling problem with the sequence dependent setup times: A heuristic approach

Abstract This paper proposes a new heuristic method for the general flowshop scheduling problem with the due dates and the sequence dependent setup times (SDSTs) where the objective is to minimize the total weighted tardiness. The approach consists of two phases: in the first phase, a permutation sequence is obtained and this sequence is then improved by a non-permutation local search in the next phase. Using some well-known standard benchmark problems, we examine the performance of the proposed algorithm and our computational results indicate that, despite its simplicity, the proposed heuristic approach provides better solutions than some other alternative methods.