A Composite Algorithm for Total Completion-Time Minimization in Large Flow Shop Scheduling

In this paper, a composite algorithm is proposed by integrating FL (described by Framinan and Leisten, OMEGA, 2003) with LW (presented by X.P. Li & C. Wu, Chinese Journal of Electronics, 2005) for large flow shop scheduling problem with total completion-time minimization, in which INSERT and SWAP (introduced by X.P. Li et al., Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2006) are adopted to reduce CPU-time. In the proposal, LW starts its iterative RZ-insertion procedure from the initial solution constructed by FL and advantages of both FL and LW are inherited. Computational results show that the proposal considerably outperforms both FL and LW, needs a little more CPU-time than FL does but much more than LW does