Title: An adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm for blocking flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times

Authors: Faezeh Bagheri; Morteza Kazemi; Ardavan Asef-Vaziri; Mahsa Mahdavisharif

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, Shiraz University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran ' Industrial Engineering Department, Shiraz University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran ' David Nazarian College of Business and Economics, California State University, Northridge, USA ' Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca Degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy

Abstract: Flowshop scheduling problem (FSP) belongs to the classical combinatorial optimisation problem and takes different forms under different production conditions. To make the general form of FSP closer to the real production environment, two assumptions, including blocking and sequence-dependent setup time, were added. The first attempt of the current research work is proposing a mathematical model according to two different viewpoints about blocking occurrence affected by sequence-dependent setup time that try to use the dead time (blocking or idle time) for setting-up the next job. Due to the complex intrinsic of combinatorial problems, achieving the exact result on a large-scale through a mathematical model is almost complicated. The second attempt is developing an adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm to solve the problem on a large-scale which is accelerated by a new constructive heuristic algorithm. Extensive computational experiments on various size problems support the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Keywords: flowshop; blocking; sequence-dependent setup time; heuristics algorithm; adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm; mathematical modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2024.138924

International Journal of Operational Research, 2024 Vol.50 No.2, pp.209 - 235

Received: 16 Jun 2020
Accepted: 16 Sep 2021
Published online: 04 Jun 2024 *

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