Meta-heuristic approaches for flowshop scheduling problems: a review

The right approach towards the optimisation of multi-objective nonlinear problem is the incremental adoption of available techniques and strategies that help to minimise the solution time and to improve the optimised results. Meta-heuristics are heuristic methods that help the search through the solution space using algorithms. Meta-heuristics further improve the solution that comes initially from heuristics. This paper presents various types of meta-heuristics approaches for optimising flowshop scheduling (FSS) with focus on minimising parameters like total tardiness, total earliness, maximum makespan, total no. of tardy jobs, etc. Since the problem is NP-hard, the meta-heuristics and hybrid meta-heuristics are most appropriate methods to solve this kind of problem. Meta-heuristics are projected as strategic means to achieve the optimum and efficient schedule, with positive impact on cost minimisation (economies of scale) and simultaneously reducing solution time.