Appling Metaheuristic Algorithms on a Two Stage Hybrid Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Serial Batching (RESEARCH NOTE)

In this paper the problem of serial batch scheduling in a two-stage hybrid flow shop environment with minimizing Makesapn is investigated. In serial batching it is assumed that jobs in a batch are processed serially, and their completion time is defined to be equal to the finishing time of the last job in the batch. The analysis and implementation of the prohibited transference of jobs among the machines of stage one in serial batch is the main contribution of this research. Machine set-up and released time for all jobs are assumed to be zero and no Preemption is allowed. Machines may not breakdown but at times they may be idle. As the problem is NP-hard, a simulated annealing (SA) is developed to give near optimal solutions. Since this problem has also not been studied previously, therefore, a lower bound is developed for evaluating the performance of the proposed SA. Many test problems have been solved using SA and results compared with lower bound. Results showed SA can provide a good near optimal solution for small, median and large size problems in reasonable time.