Scheduling to minimize mean tardiness and weighted mean tardiness in flowshop and flowline-based manufacturing cell

The problem of scheduling in flowshop and flowline-based manufacturing cell (or simply, a cell) is considered with the objective of minimizing mean tardiness of jobs. A heuristic algorithm, based on the simulated annealing (SA) technique, is developed. We propose a method for obtaining a seed sequence. We then present two perturbation schemes, the Random Insertion Perturbation Scheme and the Curtailed Random Insertion Perturbation Scheme. The proposed SA algorithm with two schemes is evaluated against the existing heuristics that seek to minimize mean tardiness of jobs. The results of the computational evaluation reveal that the proposed SA algorithm with two schemes performs better than the existing heuristics. A similar performance is also observed in the cell scheduling problem. We have also evaluated the effectiveness of the SA algorithm in minimizing the weighted mean tardiness of jobs. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.