An upgraded iterated greedy scheduling algorithm for distributed blocking flowshop group problem

Owing to the needs of production technology, the demand for group scheduling models will further increase to save costs and time. Thus, the flowshop group scheduling problem (FGSP) has attracted a lot of attention, and is of theoretical significance for academic discussion and practical application. In this paper, we consider a distributed FGSP with blocking constrain (DBFGSP). First, a mathematical model of DBFGSP with makespan criterion is formulated and an upgraded iterative greedy algorithm based on intra-group and inter-group operations (UIG) is developed to increase the solution diversity and balance global and local search capabilities. Through numerical simulation of 810 test cases and statistical comparisons with four representative algorithms, it is verified that the proposed UIG algorithm can obtain good scheduling schemes for DBFGSP.