Self-adaptive ruin-and-recreate algorithm for minimizing total flow time in no-wait flowshops

•This paper studies the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with total flow time criterion.•The proposed SR&R algorithm improves upon the best known solutions in more than half benchmark instances.•This work provides an easy-to-use approach to solve this NP-complete problem.

This paper studies the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with total flow time criterion, which is NP-complete in the strong sense. A self-adaptive ruin-and-recreate (SR&R) algorithm is proposed to solve this complex problem. The performance of the proposed SR&R algorithm is compared with that of the best available heuristics and the SR&R algorithm without the self-adaptive mechanism by application to a set of classic benchmark instances that were presented by Taillard. Computational results show that the proposed SR&R algorithm improves upon the best known solutions in more than half benchmark instances, and provides the best known solutions for the remaining unimproved instances in a reasonable computational time. The contribution of this work is to provide an easy-to-use approach to solve effectively and efficiently this practical but complex scheduling problem.