Tsp-based scheduling in a batch-wise hybrid flow-shop

In the past few years, flexible production systems have allowed an extensive exploitation of new technologies, but have also led to new difficulties in production planning management science. The model presented in this paper extends the traditional HFS (hybrid flowshop) scheduling problem to the case in which jobs are due to follow strict precedence constraints and batch assignment constraints and the parallel machines at a stage are served by a bottleneck machine. A variant of the well-known TSP problem is used to develop an efficient heuristic solution for the problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through a comparison with different heuristics traditionally used in HFS scheduling problems. Furthermore, a simple insertion heuristic based on the TSP model of the problem is tested. Finally, a MTP-based approach is also explored to provide the optimum solutions within much larger times for comparison. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.