A new constructive heuristic for the Fm|block|¿T

Abstract

This paper deals with the blocking flow shop problem and proposes new constructive procedure s for the total tardiness minimization of jobs. The heuristic has three - phases to build the sequence; the first phase selects the first job to be scheduled, the second phase ar ranges the remaining jobs and the third phase uses the insertion procedure of NEH to improve the sequence. T he proposed proce- dures evaluate the tardiness associated to the sequence obtained before and after the third phase in order to keep the best of both because , we have observed , that the insertion phase can worsen the result . The c omputational evaluation of these procedures against the benchmark constructive procedures from the literature re- veals their good performance