MINIMIZING MAKESPAN USING NODE-BASED COINCIDENCE ALGORITHM IN THE PERMUTATION FLOWSHOP SCHEDULING PROBLEM

Abstract

Scheduling problem has always been an important problem in the industrial sectors since it creates huge impact on the overall performance of the manufacturing. Good scheduling can reduce overall production time which then leads to lower cost and good resource management. The permutation flowshop scheduling (PFSP) is the classic scheduling problems that attracts both business and research area for almost half a century. On research side, a variety of complex algorithms have been introduced to solve the problems and provide high quality of solutions. Nevertheless, these algorithms will be useless if they fail to implement in practice where computational time and complexity of algorithm become an important issue of concern. This research proposes a Node-Based Coincidence Algorithm (NB-COIN) for the permutation flowshop scheduling problems (PFSP) aimed at Makespan minimization. NB-COIN is proved to be an effective algorithm that can provide good quality solutions using small amount of time and resources. The results generated by NB-COIN are also better than other well-known algorithms in consideration. Based on the bench-mark data sets of Taillard, 10% of the solutions provided by the presented algorithm are optimal solutions. Moreover, the solutions found by NB-COIN are also achieve 0.96% gap from upper bound in average. More importantly, those solutions are found within a short time.