Scheduling Blocking Flow Shops Using Meta-RaPS

A single machine that includes loading/unloading areas for each job processed, loading and unloading could be performed while the machine is running causing minimized jobs completion time with lowest machine idle time. This design requires special kind of scheduling technique to ensure the accomplishment of those objectives if jobs’ processing, loading and unloading times are varying. The machine is modelled as a flow shop with blocking constraint. This research focuses on finding a solution to schedule this special case of flow shop of more than two machines with objective of minimizing jobs maximum completion time (makespan). The proposed solution in this research includes using a newly developed meta-heuristic known as Meta-heuristic for Randomized Priority Search (Meta-RaPS). Meta-RaPS construction phase is applied with the use of NEH flow shop scheduling algorithm and would provide very good schedules. The suggested technique is evaluated in comparison to top performing current meta-heuristics and construction heuristics on the famous benchmark flow shop data set of Taillard20. The results would suggest that applying Meta-RaPS for this flow shop problem is a great choice for constructing solutions and would provide high quality solutions with opportunity of more improvement in further research.