Bottleneck adjacent matching 4 (BAM4) heuristic for re-entrant flow shop with dominant machine

This paper presents the second version of scheduling heuristic to minimize the makespan of a re-entrant flow shop with dominant characteristic at first process. The processes scheduling resembles a four machine permutation re-entrant flow shop with the process routing of M1,M2,M3,M4,M3,M4 in which the first process at M1 has high tendency of exhibiting dominant characteristic. The BAM4 is developed based on the bottleneck correction factor algorithm introduced to the makespan computation using bottleneck approach. It was shown that using bottleneck-based analysis, an effective constructive heuristic can be developed to solve for near-optimal scheduling sequence. At strong machine dominance level and medium to high job numbers, this heuristic shows slightly better makespan performance compared to the NEH. However, for smaller job numbers, NEH is superior.