The Relationship between Maximum Completion Time and Total Completion Time in Flowshop Production

Utilization and work-in-process (WIP) inventories of flow lines are two managerial concerns in manufacturing systems. They relate to two objectives in flowshop production scheduling respectively. Minimization of maximum completion time relates to utilization improvement of flow lines, and minimization of average completion time relates to WIP inventory management. However, these two objectives are inconsistent, although maximum completion time is part of the average completion time. In this paper, we propose a novel objective for flowshop production and a state space with head, body and tail (SS-HBT) heuristic to balance such inconsistency between the two objectives. Through case studies, we show that our SS-HBT heuristic outperforms two well-established heuristics in flowshop production scheduling.