Abstract:
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This work deals with the permutation flow-shop scheduling problem
with and without storage space between stages, where the performance
criterion is the makespan. Many proposed procedures to solve these problems
have an improvement phase based on the search in the pair-wise interchange
neighbourhood. The authors have observed large plateaus in the solutions
domain of these problems defined for this type of neighbourhood that make it
difficult for the heuristics to search for a road to the optimum. An improvement
heuristic is proposed, which uses two tools in order to evade these difficulties: a
stochastic exploration of the neighbourhood (revolver) and a special
consideration of ties. The improvement heuristic is applied, in conjunction with
three adapted well-known heuristics in the literature, to the direct and inverse
instances. The performance of the procedures was evaluated on nine generated
sets of a thousand instances and on 90 instances from Taillard (1993). The
obtained results recommend applying always the constructive heuristic
procedures on the direct and inverse instance. The computational experience
proves the effectiveness of the two tools implemented in the improvement
phase. |