On the NEH heuristic for minimizing the makespan in permutation flow shops

Over the last 20 years the NEH heuristic of Nawaz, Enscore, and Ham published in this journal has been commonly regarded as the best heuristic for minimizing the makespan in permutation flow shops. In recent years some authors claimed to develop new heuristics that are competitive or outperform NEH. Our study reveals that these claims are not justified. We also address the issue of a fair comparison of the NEH results with those obtained by metaheuristics. Finally we conduct a thorough analysis of NEH leading to its modification which secures the optimality in the two-machine case and improves the general performance.