M-machine No-wait Flowshop Scheduling to Minimize Total Flow Time Using An Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

No-wait flowshop scheduling problems deal with scheduling a set of n jobs where each job is processed continuously through m machines in the same order as per the technological requirement of the process, that is, once a job is started on the first machine, it has to be continuously processed through m machines without interruption. The no-wait flowshop situation arises in many realistic production environments such as hot metal rolling, the plastic molding, chemical and pharmaceutical, food processing and other industrial environments due to the processing characteristics of a product where each process follows immediately the previous one.This paper studies m-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total flow time. Since the problem is known as NP-hard, an Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is presented to solve the large-sized problems in a reasonable computational time. We conduct experiments to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and compare it with existing heuristics. Computational results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the best-known heuristics and confirm the improvement in solution quality.

Keywords:

Scheduling , M-machine No-wait Flowshop , Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm , Total Flow Time