Surveys of production scheduling show that meeting customer due dates is a critical concern in most manufacturing systems. While there is considerable research to minimize the makespan in a flowshop with no storage constraints, very little work has dealt with job total tardiness criterion in a flowshop with blocking in-process. Scheduling problems with blocking arise in serial manufacturing processes where no intermediate buffer storage is available. In this paper we investigate the application of tabu search to this problem in order to explore the solution space. Additional strategies are evaluated. Computational tests are presented and comparisons with the NEH algorithm and with a Branch-and-Bound algorithm are made.
scheduling; flowshop with blocking; tabu search
