A heuristic for two-stage no-wait hybrid flowshop scheduling with a single machine in either stage

This paper studies the hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem with no-wait restrictions. The production process consists of two machine centers, one has a single machine and the other has more than one parallel machine. A greedy heuristic named least deviation algorithm is designed and its worst case performance is analyzed. Computational results are also given to show the algorithm's average performance compared with some other algorithms. The least deviation algorithm outperforms the others in most cases tested here, and it is of low computational complexity and is easy to carry out, thus it is of favorable application value.