A hybrid three-stage flowshop problem: Efficient heuristics to minimize makespan

We treat a problem of scheduling n jobs on a three stages hybrid flowshop of particular structure (one machine in the first and third stages and two dedicated machines in stage two). The objective is to minimize the makespan. This problem is NP-complete. We propose two heuristic procedures to cope with realistic problems. Extensive experimentation with various problem sizes are conducted and the computational results show excellent performance of the proposed heuristics.