A comprehensive review and evaluation of permutation flowshop heuristics to minimize flowtime

[EN] In recent years, a large number of heuristics have been proposed for the minimization of the total or mean flowtime/completion time of the well-known permutation flowshop scheduling problem. Although some literature reviews and comparisons have been made, they do not include the latest available heuristics and results are hard to compare as no common benchmarks and computing platforms have been employed. Furthermore, existing partial comparisons lack the application of powerful statistical tools. The result is that it is not clear which heuristics, especially among the recent ones, are the best. This paper presents a comprehensive review and computational evaluation as well as a statistical assessment of 22 existing heuristics. From the knowledge obtained after such a detailed comparison, five new heuristics are presented. Careful designs of experiments and analyses of variance (ANOVA) techniques are applied to guarantee sound conclusions. The comparison results identify the best existing methods and show that the five newly presented heuristics are competitive or better than the best performing ones in the literature for the permutation flowshop problem with the total completion time criterionThis research is partially supported by National Science Foundation of China (60874075, 61174187), and Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (BS2010DX005), and Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (20100480897). Ruben Ruiz is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under the project "SMPA-Advanced Parallel Multiobjective Sequencing: Practical and Theorerical Advances" with reference DPI2008-03511/DPI and by the Small and Medium Industry of the Generalitat Valenciana (IMPIVA) and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) inside the R+D program "Ayudas dirigidas a Institutos Tecnologicos de la Red IMPIVA" during the year 2011, with project number IMDEEA/2011/142.Pan, Q.; Ruiz García, R. (2013). A comprehensive review and evaluation of permutation flowshop heuristics to minimize flowtime. Computers and Operations Research. 40(1):117-128. doi:10.1016/j.cor.2012.05.018S11712840