Minimizing total flow time for the non-permutation flow shop scheduling problem with learning effects and availability constraints

The flow shop scheduling problem is an attractive subject in the field of scheduling, which has attracted the attention of many researchers in the past five decades. In this paper, the non-permutation flow shop scheduling problem with the learning effects and machine availability constraints has been studied for minimizing the total flow time as a performance measure. First, a mixed integer linear programming model has been proposed for the modeling of the problem and then, an effective improving heuristic method, which is able to find proper non-permutation solutions, has been presented. Finally, the computational results are used for evaluation the performance and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. (C) 2012 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.