Iterated Greedy Algorithm for Solving a Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Reentrant Jobs

This paper studies a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with reentrant jobs from a copper strip cold rolling process in copper plants. The objective is to find a near-optimal job sequences to minimize makespan. A mixed integer program is created to describe this problem. An iterated greedy heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. Practical instances are collected from a Chinese copper plant to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively solve the large-scale instances.