| Abstract: | This paper presents a scheduling algorithm to solve flowshop problems with a common job sequence on all machines. This algorithm uses makespan as its criterion. Initially, it chooses a preferred sequence by scanning the processing times matrix and making a few calculations. The makespan time of the preferred job-sequence is further reduced by using an improvement routine that allows interchanges between adjacent jobs. Solutions of 1200 problems are compared with the best solutions previously reported for corresponding size problems in the Campbell-Dudek-Smith (C-D-S) paper 1]. This algorithm offers up to 1% average improvement in reducing the makespan of nearly 50% of the problem sets over the results of the existing algorithms, and its computational time requirements are about one-fifth of that of the C-D-S algorithm. |
