Total completion time minimization for scheduling of two-machine flow shop with deterioration jobs and setup time

Abstract

This article studies a scheduling problem of a two-machine flow shop with both time-dependent deteriorating jobs and sequence-independent setup time. It is assumed that the deterioration of processing time and setup time is of a linear increasing function with respect to the starting time. The objective is to minimize the total completion time of all jobs. For such a scheduling problem, a mixed integer programming model is developed to find an optimal solution for small-sized problems. For medium- and large-sized problems, a modified variable neighborhood search algorithm is presented. To improve the performance of the algorithm, a greedy algorithm is proposed to find a good initial solution. Also, lower bounds are presented for performance evaluation. Numerical experiments are used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, and the results show that an optimal or near-optimal solution can be obtained.