Sharif Digital Repository

Flow shop scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setup times and minimising the number of tardy jobs as the criterion (F m |prmu, S ijk |∑U j) are considered in this research. A mixed-integer linear programming model is developed for the research problem. Since the proposed research problem has been proven to be NP-hard, several meta-heuristic algorithms based on tabu search (TS) and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) are proposed to heuristically solve the problem. In order to find the best meta-heuristic algorithm, random test problems, ranging in size from small, medium, to large, are generated and solved by the meta-heuristic algorithms. Then, a detailed statistical...