A New Priority Rule for Initial Ordering of Jobs in Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problems

Scheduling in a permutation flowshop refers to processing of jobs in a set of available machines in the same order. Among the several possible performance characteristics of a flowshop, makespan remains one of the highest preferred metrics by researchers in the past six decades. The constructive heuristic proposed by Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) is one of the best for makespan minimization. The performance essentially depends on the initial ordering jobs according to a particular priority rule (PR). The popular priority rules are non-increasing order of the jobs' total processing time, the sum of average processing time and standard deviation and, the sum of average processing time, standard deviation and absolute skewness among others. The objective of this paper is to propose and analyse a new job priority rule for the permutation flowshop. The popular priority rules available in the literature are studied and, one of the best priority rules; the sum of average processing time and standard deviation is slightly modified, by replacing the standard deviation by mean absolute deviation (MAD). To assess the performance of the new rule, four benchmark datasets are used. The computational results and statistical analyses demonstrate the better performance of the new rule.

@article{Dhanasakkaravarthi2022,
  title     = {A New Priority Rule for Initial Ordering of Jobs in Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problems},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {13},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2022},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {B. Dhanasakkaravarthi and A. Krishnamoorthy},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2022.0130151},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2022.0130151}
}