Flow shop Problem with transportation considerations

Abstract

Motivated by applications in manufacturing systems. This paper deals with a scheduling problem of independent tasks with addi- tional constraints (transportation times), where the objective is to min- imize the total completion time. This problem arises in automated cells and is a complex flow shop problem with a transportation robot or con- veyor. Since the problem is NP-hard, heuristics are developed to give near optimal solutions. Two new programming algorithms are also proposed for solving some special cases of this problem. Finally, we evaluate the proposed heuristics, giving experimental results on randomly generated test problems.