New hard benchmark for flowshop scheduling problems minimising makespan

Abstract

In this work a new benchmark of hard instances for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimising the makespan is proposed. The new benchmark consists of 240 large instances and 240 small instances with up to 800 jobs and 60 machines. One of the objectives of the work is to generate a benchmark which satisfies the desired characteristics of any benchmark: comprehensive, amenable for statistical analysis and discriminant when several algorithms are compared. An exhaustive experimental procedure is carried out in order to select the hard instances, generating thousands of instances and selecting the hardest ones from the point of view of a gap computed as the difference between very good upper and lower bounds for each instance. Extensive generation and computational experiments, which have taken almost six years of combined CPU time, demonstrate that the proposed benchmark is harder and with more discriminant power than the most common benchmark from the literature. Moreover, a website is developed for researchers in order to share sets of instances, best known solutions and lower bounds, etc. for any combinatorial optimisation problem.

Hybrid Algorithm Based on an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm and Cuckoo Search for the No Idle Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with the Total Tardiness Criterion Minimization

“…Many tests are performed by utilizing the novel Ruiz benchmark instances in 2015 to investigate the performance of the proposed HEDA_CS [30]. All of the data can be obtained at http://soa.iti.es (accessed on 16 April 2017).…”

“…Significant applications of hybrid algorithms to solve scheduling problems with suitable performance have been explored in the past few decades [29][30][31][32]. This section presents the novel HEDA_CS for solving the NIPFSP with the total tardiness minimization.…”

A new Nawaz–Enscore–Ham-based heuristic for permutation flow-shop problems with bicriteria of makespan and machine idle time

“…To evaluate the performance of the new proposed heuristic, Taillard (Taillard 1993) test bed, VRF benchmark (Vallada, Ruiz, and Framinan 2015) and a randomly generated test bed were used. The test bed presented by Taillard includes 120 instances, 12 different size problems ranging from small size problem, n=20 and m=5 to large size problem n=500 and m=20.…”

“…Herein, a novel heuristic algorithm based on NEH approach is proposed by utilizing a new priority rule and a new tie breaking method with the two objectives. Its effectiveness is validated through statistical tests with common benchmarks (Taillard 1993;Vallada, Ruiz, and Framinan 2015) by comparing to existing dominating algorithms including NEH, NEHKK1, NEH-D, NEHKK2 and NEHFF.…”

Assessing scheduling policies in a permutation flowshop with common due dates

“…the upper bounds provided by Taillard (2014). In fact, 92 of these 120 upper bounds are known to be optimal, and, for the remaining 28, the average gap between the best known solution and the highest known lower bound is just 0.94% (Vallada et al, 2015).…”