Optimizing distributed no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with setup times and maintenance operations via iterated greedy algorithm

Nowadays, distributed scheduling problem is a reality in many companies. Over the last years, an increasingly attention has been given to the distributed flow shop scheduling problem and the addition of constraints to the problem. This article introduces the distributed no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and maintenance operations to minimize makespan. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is to mathematically describe the problem and heuristic procedures to incorporate maintenance operations to job scheduling are proposed. An Iterated Greedy with Variable Search Neighborhood (VNS), named IG_NM, is proposed to solve small and large instances with size of 4,800 and 13,200 problems, respectively. Computational experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of IG_NM in comparison with MILP and the most recent methods of literature of distributed flow shop scheduling problems. Statistical results show that in the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency the proposed IG_NM outperformed other metaheuristics of the literature.