Effective heuristics for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem with release dates

In recent years, the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DPFSP) has become a hotspot in research. In this paper, we change several heuristics for a single factory to the heuristics for a multi-factory environment to solve the DPFSP with total completion time (TCT) criterion. Further, these distributed heuristics are improved to deal with the minimization of the TCT for the DPFSP with release dates by modifying the initialization procedure and local search methods. Finally, we calculate 720 instances and compare our proposed heuristics and those from the recent literature. Computational results indicate the superiority of the presented heuristics for the problem considered.