Heuristics for a two-stage assembly flowshop with bicriteria of maximum lateness and makespan

We consider a two-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing a weighted sum of makespan and maximum lateness. The problem is known to be NP-hard, and therefore, we propose heuristics to solve the problem. The proposed heuristics are Tabu search (Tabu), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and self-adaptive differential evolution (SDE). An extensive computational experiment is conducted to compare performances of the proposed heuristics. The computational experiment reveals that both PSO and SIDE are much superior to Tabu. Moreover, it is statistically shown that PSO performs better than SDE. The computation times of both PSO and SDE are close to each other and they are less than 40 and 45 s, respectively, for the largest size problem considered. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.