Minimizing the cycle time in the distributed flow shop scheduling problem

Abstract We deal with the problem of cyclic scheduling tasks in the distributed manufacturing system with factories having the flow shop layout. The optimization aim is to minimize the cycle time. We have proposed the proprietary model and introduced some special properties of the problem, which allow us to find the cycle time for each given particular solution quickly. Since the formulated problem is NP-hard, we propose a metaheuristic algorithm based on the tabu search approach. The quality of the algorithm has been verified experimentally on common benchmarks and compared to other methods known in the literature, namely the scatter search and list scheduling. The problem also has a relation with the problem of balancing workloads of identical parallel production lines.