Flowshop Scheduling

Abstract

A flowshop, as described in Chapter 1, is characterized by unidirectional flow of work with a variety of jobs being processed sequentially in a one-pass manner. A job shop, on the other hand, involves processing on several machines without any “series” structure. In the past four decades extensive research has been done on both flowshop and job shop problems. This chapter evolves a synthesis of the best-known heuristic and meta-heuristic scheduling methods for single objective flowshop problems. We show that a strategy combining the strengths of the different methods produces solutions of good quality—faster than any single solution strategy.