Minimizing waiting time of jobs in flow-shop scheduling: A heuristic approach

Abstract The paper focuses on to minimize total waiting time of jobs while considering a two-machine flow- shop scheduling problem with random processing times. Existing study provides an exact method for the n job 2 machine specially structured problem where the processing times on first machine never be greater than any of processing time on second machine. The major concern of the study is to propose a heuristic which on execution provides us the optimal or near optimal schedule where processing times are on the whole arbitrary. Several numerical examples are generated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach and comparison of the results have been done with the existing exact method results to show the effectiveness of proposed heuristic.