A tabu search algorithm for a flexible flow line with unrelated parallel machines and with a bottleneck stage

Abstract

The problem considered in this paper is a flexible flow line with a multiple serial stages, where there are one or more unrelated parallel machines at each stage and there exists a bottleneck stage in the system. The objective of the scheduling problem is to minimize makespan. A bottleneck-based tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In order to achieve maximum effectiveness and efficiency of the tabu search algorithm, an efficient bottleneck-focused initial solution and a candidate list strategy are examined in the algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the suggested tabu search algorithm, a traditional tabu search algorithm is investigated for comparison purposes and computational experiments are performed on randomly generated test problems. Results show that the proposed bottleneck-based tabu search algorithm performs well.