One of the largest bottlenecks in iron and steel production is the steelmaking-continuous casting (SCC) process, which consists of steel-making, refining and continuous casting. The SCC scheduling is a complex hybrid flowshop (HFS) scheduling problem with the following features: job grouping and...

In the no-idle flowshop, machines cannot be idle after finishing one job and before starting the next one. Therefore, start times of jobs must be delayed to guarantee this constraint. In practice machines show this behavior as it might be technically unfeasible or uneconomical to stop a machine...

The hybrid flowshop scheduling (HFS) problem with the objective of minimising the makespan has important applications in a variety of industrial systems. This paper presents an effective discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm that has a hybrid representation and a combination of forward...

A novel Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) algorithm is proposed in this paper for solving no-idle permutation flow-shop scheduling problems with maximum completion time (makespan) criterion. Firstly, individuals of the DDE algorithm are represented as discrete job permutations, and new...

Flowshop scheduling is a very active research area. This problem still attracts a considerable amount of interest despite the sheer amount of available results. Total flowtime minimization of a flowshop has been actively studied and many effective algorithms have been proposed in the last few...

The blocking flowshop scheduling problem with makespan criterion has important applications in a variety of industrial systems. Heuristics that explore specific characteristics of the problem are essential for many practical systems to find good solutions with limited computational effort. This...

Lot-streaming flow shops have important applications in different industries including textile, plastic, chemical, semiconductor and many others. This paper considers an n-job m-machine lot-streaming flow shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times under both the idling and...

This paper presents a hybrid harmony search (HHS) algorithm for solving no-wait flow shop scheduling problems with total flowtime criterion. First, an initial harmony memory (HM) is formed by taking advantage of the NEH heuristic. Second, the harmony memory is divided into several small groups...