Minimizing Total Completion Time in Mixed-Blocking Permutation Flowshops

Scheduling decisions are of certain cachet in production and operations management. Many extensions are developed to help address different scheduling industrial situations, one of which, the Mixed-Blocking Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem (MBPFSP), has gained recent recognition due to its wide industrial applications both in manufacturing and service sectors. Given the complexities of MBPFSPs, effective heuristics are needed to help generate dependable solutions for industrial-scale applications. This article proposes an Extended Simulated Annealing (ESA) algorithm to minimize total completion time (TCT) in MBPFSPs, which is the first study in the literature of MBPFSPs considering a measure that helps improve the system's average response time. Through extensive computational experiments, it is shown that the ESA outperforms the best existing solution algorithms proposed for solving the MBPFSPs. Given the freshness of the topic, this research facilitates MBPFSP's wide range of industrial applications to narrow the gap between scheduling theory and practical applications.