Minimizing Total Tardiness in the Distributed Flowshop Group Scheduling Problem with an Iterated Greedy Algorithm

This paper studies a distributed permutation flowshop group scheduling problem (DPFGSP) with a total tardiness criterion, which has significant applications in the current manufacturing environment. The considered problem can be broken down into three sub-problems: how to assign the families to each factory, how to determine the sequence of the families within each factory, and the processing order of jobs within each family. The paper proposes an effective two-stage iterated greedy algorithm (FJIG) to minimize the total tardiness time for the DPFGSP and utilizes an improved NEH heuristic to generate an initial solution for the proposed FJIG. Comprehensive statistical experiments are carried out to test the effectiveness of the FJIG and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FJIG is very effective for the DPFGSP with total tardiness criterion.