Heuristics and lower bounds for minimizing the total completion time in a two-machine flowshop

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of completion times in a two-machine permutation flowshop subject to release dates. We develop several lower bounds and we describe constructive heuristics as well as an effective genetic local search algorithm. Computational experiments carried out on a large set of randomly generated instances provide evidence that a constructive heuristic based on new derived priority rule as well as the genetic algorithm perform consistently well.