Minimising makespan in distributed mixed no-idle flowshops

The rapid growth of distributed manufacturing in industry today has recently attracted significant research attention that has focused on distributed scheduling problems. This work studied the distributed mixed no-idle flowshop scheduling problem using makespan as an optimality criterion. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to study the multi-flowshop extension in which each flowshop has mixed no-idle constraints. A novel cloud theory-based iterated greedy (CTBIG) algorithm was proposed for solving the problem. Computational experiments conducted on a set of test instances revealed that the proposed CTBIG algorithm significantly outperformed classic iterated greedy algorithms.