Heuristics for Scheduling Hybrid Flow Shop with Time Windows

Abstract—This paper focuses on the hybrid flow shop with time windows constraint. The objective of this research is to minimize the make span. Time window constraints are often found in the hard drive industries requirement for controlling production time on the manufacturing shop floor. In this hybrid flow shop environment there are S production stages, each of which may have more than one unrelated machine and batch processing. In this paper, three heuristics which included a basic heuristic and two improved heuristics were developed to solve several problem sets. To access the performance of the heuristics developed, the solutions in terms of make span, mean flow time, and number of lot- loss were compared with the best heuristic solution. The computation results proved that the heuristics are efficient.