Meta-heuristics for scheduling a flowline manufacturing cell with sequence dependent family setup times

This paper presents various Tabu Search (TS) based meta-heuristics for scheduling the part families and jobs within each family in a flowline manufacturing cell (also called a flowshop) with sequence dependent family setup times to minimize makespan. Concepts of Elitism and the acceptance of worse moves from simulated annealing (SA) are examined in the proposed meta-heuristics to improve intensification and diversification. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed TS based meta-heuristics are compared against the best meta-heuristic and heuristic algorithms reported so far for this problem on several test problems. Computational results show that the best proposed TS based meta-heuristic is quite effective in minimizing makespan in a reasonable amount of CPU time. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.