Iterated reference greedy algorithm for solving distributed no-idle permutation flowshop scheduling problems

•This paper investigates a new flowshop scheduling problem.•An algorithm for effectively solving this problem is presented.•The proposed algorithm outperforms the famous Iterated Greedy algorithm.

This paper investigates the Distributed No-idle Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem (DNIPFSP) with the objective of minimizing the makespan, which has not been discussed in any previous study. This study presents an Iterated Reference Greedy (IRG) algorithm for effectively solving this problem. The performance of the proposed IRG algorithm is compared with a state-of-the-art iterated greedy (IG) algorithm, as well as the Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model on two well-known benchmark problem sets. Computational results show that the proposed IRG algorithm outperforms the IG algorithm. Given the NP-Complete nature of the DNIPFSP problem, this paper is the first study to contribute a feasible approach for solving it effectively.