Solving the Total Weighted Earliness Tardiness Blocking Flowshop Scheduling Problem

Punctual delivery is of great importance to industrial companies because their customers typically need to receive orders by a specific date. In this study, we examine the flowshop scheduling problem with blocking constraints, which involves finding the optimal schedule to minimize the total weighted earliness and tardiness from the due date window. Previous research has demonstrated that this problem is NP-hard, meaning that it is computationally difficult to solve. To address this issue, we propose an effective iterated greedy algorithm. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated using a set of 110 benchmark instances and compared to seven other methods from the scheduling literature that have been selected and re-implemented for comparison. The results of the study show that our approach is efficient.