Metaheuristic approaches for the two-machine flow-shop problem with weighted late work criterion and common due date

In this paper, metaheuristic approaches for the two-machine flow-shop problem with a common due date and the weighted late work performance measure (F2|d(j) = d|Y-w) are presented. The late work criterion estimates the quality of a solution with regard to the duration of the late parts of jobs, not taking into account the quantity of the delay for the fully late activities. Since the problem mentioned is known to be NP-hard, three trajectory methods, namely simulated annealing, tabu search and variable neighborhood search are proposed based on the special features of the case under consideration. Then, the results of computational experiments are reported, in which the metaheuristics were compared one to each other, as well to an exact approach and a list scheduling algorithm. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.