Minimizing makespan in reentrant flow-shops using hybrid tabu search

This study considers the problem of reentrant flow-shop (RFS) scheduling, and applies hybrid tabu search (HTS) to minimize the makespan of jobs. The hybridization method is used to enhance the performance of pure tabu search. The HTS is compared to the optimal solutions generated by the integer programming technique, and to the near optimal solutions generated by pure tabu search and the non-delay schedule generation procedure. Computational experiments are performed to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed HTS algorithm.