A travelling salesman approach to solve the F/no-idle/Cmax problem

This paper investigates the F/no-idle/Cmax problem, where machines work continuously without idle time intervals. The idle characteristic is a very strong constraint and it affects seriously the value of Cmax criterion. We treat here only the permutation flow-shop configuration for machine no-idle problems with the objective to minimise the makespan. Based on the idea that this problem can be modelled as a travelling salesman problem, an adaptation of the well-known nearest insertion rule is proposed to solve it. A computational study shows the result quality.