A comparison of flow shop based heuristics for group scheduling

This paper proposes two new heuristic procedures for the group scheduling problem. These procedures extend the CDS and NEH flow shop scheduling procedures to the group scheduling problem. The two new procedures and two procedures previously developed by Wemmerlov and Vakharia [4] are tested on several problem sets with varying numbers of families, jobs and machines, and varying setup time distributions. The procedures are evaluated on the basis of the makespans for the solutions that were generated. The results show that the new procedures generate solutions with improved makespans.