A Simple No-Wait Flowshop Scheduling Heuristic For The No-Wait Flow-Shop Problem

Sequencing and scheduling are forms of decision making which play a key role in manufacturing. This paper presents the description of a scheduling algorithm for the solution of the \no-wait" shop oor problem, which means that a job once started must be processed until completion without any interruption either on or between machines. The goal the of heuristics is to minimize the sum of the total ow times, and therefore the average processing time. This is a sensible target in applications such as agile manufacturing where jobs are constantly added to the job list. The main strengths of the heuristics reported in this paper are simplicity, and ease of implementation. INTRODUCTION The scheduling problem is concerned with setting the timetable for the processing of jobs to machines in order to optimize a given measure of performance. Many researchers have proposed approaches for solving these problems which have an immediate application in many elds of manufacturing. The number of pu..