Assessing the Performance of Dispatching Policies for Hybrid Flowshop Manufacturing Systems

This paper considers the problem of scheduling a given set of jobs or tasks in a hybrid flowshop system. Since this problem is known in the literature to be NP-hard, most of academic works has been centered on the analysis of meta-heuristics and hybridized procedures. However, intelligent manufacturing systems in actual industrial practices mostly prefer the use of simple heuristic algorithms, such as dispatching rules. The objective of this paper is to experimentally test the performance of well-known dispatching rules such as FCFS (First Come First Serve), EDD (Earliest Due Date), SLACK, and SRMWK (Slack per Remaining Work). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that aimed at this assessment. Various objective functions are considered: makespan, total tardiness, and the number of tardy jobs. Computational experiments are carried out using datasets from the literature.