Blocking phenomenon occurs in a flowshop that has a limited buffer between any two successive machines. Once the buffer is full, the upstream machine is forbidden to release a finished job. The job has to remain on the machine until the buffer can accommodate it. This study investigates a blocking flowshop scheduling problem, in which each job has its own release date, with the optimal criterion of minimizing the total cubic completion time. Given that the problem is NP-hard, a metaheuristic algorithm can efficiently achieve a near-optimal solution within a due time. On the basis of the properties of job sequencing, simulated annealing, tabu search and genetic algorithm are presented to obtain high-quality solutions for medium-scale problems. A series of random experiments is conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

This work was published on IEEE Access,1-10.titled Blocking Flowshop Scheduling Model for Optimising Cubic Criterion with Release Dates.