Study on heuristics for the permutation flowshop with sequence dependent setup times

It is studied that several constructive heuristics for solving the sequence dependent setup time flowshop problem with the objective of minimizing makespan. Three priority rules imbedded in the heuristics are tested and a tie-breaking strategy is examined. The experimental results on benchmarks show that the priority rules are helpful to improve the performance, especially for the instances in which setup times are averagely smaller than the average processing time. The results also show that the setup times have a large effect on the performance of the heuristics.