Minimizing makespan in general flow-shop scheduling problem using a GA-based improvement heuristic

In the paper an improvement heuristic is proposed for permutation flow-shop problem based on the idea of evolutionary algorithm. The approach employs constructive heuristic that gives a good initial solution. GA-based improvement heuristic is applied in conjunction with three well-known constructive heuristics, namely CDS, Gupta’s algorithm and Palmer’s Slope Index. The approach is tested on benchmark set of 10 problems range from 4 to 25 jobs and 4 to 30 machines. The results are also compared to the best-known lower-bound solutions.