Combining an Optimizing Method with a Genetic Algorithm to Solve a Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Additional Resources

In this paper the problem of preemptive scheduling in a flowshop with parallel unrelated machines and renewable resources is considered. A heuristic algorithm which combines an optimizing procedure solving the resource constrained scheduling problem with a genetic algorithm is proposed. The objective is to minimize makespan. A lower bound on the optimal makespan is derived. The performance of the heuristic algorithm is analyzed by a computational experiment. The results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm is an effective tool for solving large size problems.