Total tardiness minimization in permutation flow shops: a simple approach based on a variable greedy algorithm

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling jobs in a permutation flowshop with the objective of minimizing the total tardiness of jobs. To tackle this problem, it is suggested that a procedure based on a greedy algorithm is employed that successively iterates over an increasing number of candidate solutions. The computational experiments carried out show this algorithm outperforms the best existing one for the problem under consideration. In addition, out some tests are carried out to analyse the efficiency of the adopted design.