Effective heuristics for the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with total flow time minimization

The no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with total flow time criterion has important applications in industrial systems. Heuristics that explore specific characteristics of the problem are essential to find good solutions in limited computational time for many practical applications. This paper first presents two constructive heuristics, namely improved standard deviation heuristic (ISDH) and improved Bertolissi heuristic (IBH), by combining the standard deviation heuristic (Gao et al., Int J Adv Manf Technol 56:683–692, 2011) and Bertolliso heuristic (Bertolissi, J Mater Process Technol 107:459–465, 2000) with the procedure of the constructive heuristic of Laha (Int J Adv Manf Technol 41:97–109, 2009). Then, four composite heuristics, i.e., ISDH with local search, IBH with local search, ISDH with iteration, and IBH with iteration, are separately proposed using the insertion-based local search method and iteration operator to improve the solutions of the ISDH and IBH. Extensive computational experiments are carried out based on a set of well-known flow shop benchmark instances that are considered as no-wait flow shop instances. Computational results and comparisons show that the proposed composite heuristics perform significantly better than the existing ones, and the proposed composite heuristics further improve the presented constructive heuristics for the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with total flow time criterion.