Letter to the Editor—An Experimental Investigation and Comparative Evaluation of Flow-Shop Scheduling Techniques

This note is concerned with the solution of the flow-shop scheduling problem where all jobs have the same machine ordering. Because of the combinatorial nature of this problem, most practical situations remain unsolved. Various techniques such as switch and check, branch and bound with and without backtracking, modified decomposition, and rounded linear programming have been proposed by several investigators. However, no comparative evaluation of these procedures has been previously made. This note investigates the solutions obtained by these procedures considering both the quality of the solutions and the computational efficiency. Extensive experimentation has been conducted and significant results are reported. The effects of changes in the size of problems on the above criteria are also included.