Efficient upper and lower bounding methods for flowshop sequence-dependent group scheduling problems

In this research, a permutation flowshop sequence-dependent group scheduling problem with minimisation of total completion time is considered. Since the problem is shown to be strongly NP-hard, a hybrid genetic (HG) algorithm is proposed. The only available lower bounding (LB) method for the proposed research problem in the literature based on branch and price (B&P) algorithm is also enhanced by proposing efficient method to solve sub-problems and proposing a better branching rule. A statistical comparison shows that both the proposed HG algorithm and the proposed LB have better performance than the other methods from the literature with an average 5.96% percentage gap.