Minimizing total earliness and tardiness in a nowait flow shop

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of scheduling jobs in a no-wait flow shop with the objective of minimizing total earliness and tardiness. An exact branch-and-bound algorithm is developed for the problem. Several dispatching heuristics used previously for other environments and two new heuristics were tested under a variety of conditions. It was found that one of the new heuristics consistently performed well compared to the others. An insertion search improvement procedure with speed up methods based on the structure of the problem was proposed and was found to deliver much improved solutions in a reasonable amount of time.