An improved procedure for solving minimum makespan on a flowshop

This paper presents numerous heuristics, derived from the NEH heuristic, aimed at minimizing the classical permutation flowshop scheduling problem. We compare the solution, based on Taillard's benchmark problems. We propose a better schedule by comparing these heuristics and identifying common partial sequences of consecutive jobs. We identify the closest heuristic to our result by using a standard distance measure used in the literature. We use this heuristic as an initial solution for a further standard improvement procedure. The obtained average relative percentage deviation values of our procedure is within a reasonable computational effort and appears to improve the published results on these problem sets.