Evaluation of high performance constructive heuristics for the flow shop with makespan minimization

This paper analyzes the permutation flow shop scheduling problem with makespan minimization criteria. Since the publication of the well-known NEH heuristic from Nawaz, Enscore and Ham in 1983, several constructive heuristic methods have been developed. In this paper, we proposed constructive methods that make use of the principles of the NEH heuristic and recent studies to significantly improve its performance. For this purpose, 67 new constructive heuristic methods were proposed in this paper. Through a literature review, the main constructive methods for makespan minimization were identified. An extensive computational experiment was conducted with the best heuristics proposed in this paper and those identified in the literature for comparison and evaluation purposes. Based on the results, some of the proposed methods significantly outperform the literature heuristics, providing high quality solutions.