A general framework is developed to model a large variety of different cyclic machine scheduling problems with blocking with the objective to minimize the cycle time. For this framework tabu search algorithms are developed. Neighborhoods are derived which generalize the block-approach based neighborhoods which have been successfully applied to noncyclic job-shop problems and cyclic job-shop pro...

This paper considers a complex job shop problem with reentrant flow and batch processing machines. A modified shifting bottleneck heuristic (MSB) is considered for generating machine schedules to minimize the total weighted tardiness. We observe that the MSB could produce infeasible schedules where cyclic schedules are found. A cycle elimination procedure is proposed to remove the possibility o...

This paper considers a three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup < /div> times at the first stage and blocking times between each stage in such a way that the weighted mean completion time and makespan are minimized. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time using traditiona...

This paper proposes an Iterated Local Search (ILS) procedure and an Iterated Greedy (IG) algorithm, which are both combined with a variable neighbourhood search (VNS), for dealing with the flow shop problem with blocking, in order to minimize the total tardiness of jobs. The structure of both algorithms is very similar, but they differ in the way that the search is diversified in the space of s...