An improved iterated greedy algorithm for scheduling distributed permutation flowshop problems with weighted total completion time criterion

In this paper, distributed permutation flowshop problems with a weighted total completion time criterion (DPFSP-WTC) were addressed to minimize the completion time of all factories. First, the completion time of all factories were converted to a single one by a novel strategy, and a mixed integer programming model was developed. Second, an improved iterated greedy (IIG) algorithm was proposed. Based on features of the concerned problems, a simple heuristic is designed to improve the quality of initialization solutions. A local search operation was developed to improve the convergence performance of the proposed algorithm. Finally, numerous experiments were carried out for solving 720 instances with different scales. The proposed IIG was compared with five state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparisons and discussions showed that the proposed IIG has superior performance compared to its peers.