A new efficient heuristic method for minimizing the total tardiness in a no-idle permutation flow shop

This paper aims at minimizing total tardiness in a no-idle permutational flow shop environment. Even though this criterion is relevant for improving client satisfaction in production systems with strict due dates, no constructive heuristics have been developed for this specific problem so far. In this study, high performance constructive heuristics from related problems were adapted and compared to a new one proposed for the problem Fm vertical bar no - idle, prmu vertical bar Sigma T. Computational experiments show that the new method significantly outperforms the adapted existing heuristics.