An improved iterated local search for solving the total weighted earliness tardiness blocking flowshop scheduling problem

The idea of punctual delivery has appeared in many industrial companies as their customers need a fixed date in time to receive their orders. In this paper, the flowshop scheduling problem with blocking constraint is introduced aiming to minimize the total weighted earliness tardiness from the due date window. A few works in the literature have considered this problem and have proven that it is NP-hard. Therefore, we propose in this work an approach based on iterated local search in order to solve the problem. A benchmark of 110 instances is used to test the efficiency of our proposal which is compared with a set of five competing methods well selected from the scheduling literature. All procedures are re-implemented and calibrated in order to give maximum effectiveness. This result has allowed us to confirm the performance of our approaches.