Heuristics in Flow Shop Scheduling with Sequence Dependent Setup Times

This paper addresses the scheduling of jobs with sequence dependent setup times in a deterministic, static flowshop scenario. Four heuristics are described and compared with three benchmarks which represent generally practiced approaches to scheduling in this environment. Performance results are presented for a series of test problems taken from and comparable to those described in previous research. The results indicate that while sophistication does not necessarily lead to performance improvements, two of the proposed heuristics produce substantially better results than the other methods tested and merit consideration for implementation in practice.