Group scheduling problem: Key to flexible manufacturing systems

We present an efficient heuristic algorithm for determining the sequence which minimizes the makespan of a group scheduling problem at the first level. The problem, therefore, focuses on scheduling of parts (jobs) in a part family. In the generation of partial schedules at each iteration, a job with a high mean total processing time is given a higher priority than others. An example problem, chosen from a real world application, is used to implement, the algorithmic steps. For this example, it has also been shown that the makespan determine by the proposed heuristic is smaller than that determined previously by two documented algorithms.