Optimisation of sequencing and scheduling in hybrid flow shop environment using heuristic approach

This paper considers the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem. Most real world scheduling problems are NP-hard in nature. The main purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to the objective version of the well known hybrid flow shop problem. The processing of each job on each machine is an operation which requires the exclusive use of the machine for an uninterrupted duration called the processing time 't'. The objective of this paper is to find minimum makespan in a serial multiple-stage manufacturing system, where each stage consists of parallel identical machines. Generally processing of 'n' jobs by 'm' machines with 'k' stage is solved by Gantt chart method which gives an active feasible schedule. A simulated annealing algorithm is proposed in this paper to find a better/optimal or near optimal schedule. This technique reveals that the proposed algorithm is capable of providing better results than the company existing production results.