A note on the total completion time problem in a permutation flowshop with a learning effect

The concept of learning process plays a key role in production environments. However, it is relatively unexplored in the flowshop setting. In this short note, we consider a permutation flowshop scheduling problem with a learning effect where the objective is to minimize the sum of completion times or flowtime. A dominance rule and several lower bounds are established to speed tip the search for the optimal solution. In addition, the performances of several well-known heuristics are evaluated when the learning effect is present. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.