Minimizing makespan on an m-machine re-entrant flowshop

Abstract

This paper focuses on an m-machine re-entrant flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing makespan. In the re-entrant flowshop considered here, routes of all jobs are identical as in ordinary flowshops, but the jobs must be processed multiple times on the machines. We present heuristic algorithms, which are modified from well-known existing algorithms for the general m-machine flowshop, problem or newly developed in this research. For evaluation of the performance of the algorithms, computational experiments are performed on randomly generated test problems and results are reported. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.