Taguchi method for three-stage assembly flow shop scheduling problem with blocking and sequence-dependent set up times

This article considers a three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem minimizing the weighted sum of mean completion time and makespan with sequence-dependent setup times at the first stage and blocking times between each stage. To tackle such an NP-hard, two meta-heuristic algorithms are presented. The novelty of our approach is to develop a variable neighborhood search algorithm (VNS) and a well-known simulated annealing (SA) for the problem. Furthermore, to enhance the performance of the (SA), its parameters are optimized by the use of Taguchi method, but to setting parameters of VNS just one parameter has been used without Taguchi. The computational results show that the proposed VNS is better in mean and standard deviation for all sizes of the problem than SA, but on the contrary about CPU Time SA outperforms VNS.