Scheduling in flowshops to minimize total tardiness of jobs

The problem of scheduling in static flowshops is considered with the objective of minimizing mean or total tardiness of jobs. A heuristic algorithm based on the simulated annealing (SA) technique is developed. The salient features of the proposed SA algorithm are the development of two new perturbation schemes for use in the proposed SA algorithm and a new improvement scheme to improve the quality of the solutions. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by using the bench-mark problems available in the literature. The performance of the proposed SA algorithm is found to be very good, and the proposed heuristic performs better than the existing heuristics.