Heuristics for Scheduling Hybrid Flow Shop with Time Windows

as mathematical models may be intractable in terms of CPU time, or may not be viable at all in real world problems. This is where and why heuristic methods have been introduced to solve such NP problems, for they are able to provide good solutions within a suitable time frame and can be applied in real practical problems. This research therefore emphasized the development of heuristics to solve scheduling problems in the hybrid flow shop. The unrelated machines, machines eligibility restriction, and time windows were the constraints being taken into account in order to minimize the makespan and loss. In the next section, the results of the review of related literature are presented. The characteristics of the problems and assumptions are described in Section III. This is followed by Section IV presenting the development of three heuristic algorithms for solving the problem. Section V outlines the experimental design and results. Finally, a summary of the main findings is given in Section VI.