Minimizing Maximum Completion Time in a Proportionate Flow Shop

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the n-job, m-machine proportionate flow shop scheduling problem with one different machine, in which the objective is to minimize maximum completion time. Since the problem is NP-complete, local search methods may not provide solutions of good quality for large size problems. We apply a simulated annealing (SA) to find best solution. The performance of SA is compared with that of local search methods. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the performance of the proposed SA.