A constructive heuristic for minimizing makespan in no-wait flow shop scheduling

This paper presents a new constructive heuristic, based on the principle of job insertion, for minimizing makespan in no-wait permutation flow shop scheduling problems. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over four of the best-known methods in the literature. Analytical expressions for the total number of partial and complete sequences generated by the algorithms are derived. Statistical tests of significance substantiate the improvement in solution quality.