Manager’s Preferences Modeling within Multi-Criteria Flowshop Scheduling Problem: A Metaheuristic Approach

This paper proposes a metaheuristic to solve the permutation flow shop scheduling problem where several criteria are to be considered, such as: the makespan, total flowtime and total tardiness of jobs. The proposed metaheuristic is based on tabu search algorithm. The Compromise Programming model and the concept of satisfaction functions are utilized to integrate explicitly the Manager’s preferences. The proposed approach has been tested through a computational experiment. This approach can be useful for large scale scheduling problems and the Manager can consider additional scheduling criteria.