Comparative Analysis of Heuristic Rules for Flow Shop Scheduling Using ANOVA

This paper compares the performance of five heuristic rules with the objective of minimizing the makespan time. The selected heuristics are namely SAI, Palmer, Gupta, RA and CDS. The heuristics are tested on twelve flow shop problems of different sizes using a MATLAB program. The comparison was made by using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) under Completely Randomized Block Design (CRBD), where the problem size was considered as a blocking factor and the heuristic rule as the main factor. Makespan time was used as the response variable, with a significance level of α = 0.05. The findings indicated significant differences between the CDS, SAI, and Palmer heuristics, as the mean makespan achieved by the CDS heuristic is lower than that of the SAI and Palmer heuristics, while its performance was not significantly different from that of RA and Gupta.