This paper introduces a Simulated Annealing (SA) heuristic for permutation flow shop with asymmetric sequence dependent setup times (ASDST), focusing a main constraint to the output of a production system, which is the bottleneck production stage. The proposed algorithm, named "Simulated Annealing metaheuristic for floating bottleneck search" (BGaFSA), analyzes a possible change in the bottleneck stage due to the job sequencing. The SA procedure searches for the effective bottleneck stage of the production system. The performance measure is the makespan.
production scheduling; flow shop sequencing; setup times; bottleneck environment
