This paper presents an investigation about the hybrid flow shop problem with asymmetric sequence dependent setup times and proposes constructive heuristic methods to minimize the mean flow time aiming at fast demand response and work in process reduction. The proposed heuristic methods were compared among themselves since no constructive heuristic method was found in the literature on the scheduling problem considered in this work. A study on the influence of the relation between the orders of magnitude of processing and setup time for each method was carried out. The influence of the scheduling procedure adopted was investigated to assess the performance of the methods use
Production scheduling; Hybrid flow shop; Sequence dependent setup time; Heuristics