In this paper, the landscape for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) with stochastic local search and a critical block-based neighbourhood structure has been investigated. Numerical experiments using small benchmark problems show that there are good correlations between the makespans of local optima, the average distances to other local optima and the distances to the known globa...

The four-machine flowshop scheduling problem is investigated with the objective of minimizing total completion time. Job processing times are uncertain where only lower and upper bounds known. This common in some manufacturing environments. Some mathematical (dominance) relations established, an algorithm (with ten scenarios) proposed. proposed converts to a single machine for which optimal sol...

In this study, we consider a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) processing identical parts on which the loading and unloading of machines are made by a robot. The machines used in FMCs are predominantly CNC machines and these machines are flexible enough for performing several operations provided that the required tools are stored in their tool magazines. Traditional research in this area consid...

In this paper, we consider a flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and a bicriteria objective to minimize the work-in-process inventory for the producer and to maximize the customers’ service level. The use of a bicriteria objective is motivated by the fact that successful companies in today’s environment not only try to minimize their own cost but also try to fulfill ...