Concept of Logical Sort for Idle Time Minimization of Rental/Critical Machine in Flowshop

In a manufacturing environment, the high initial cost machines are processed on rental basis to meet the economy. The access of such rental or critical machines is constrained. In this research article, an attempt is made to develop a meta-heuristic to reduce the utilization tie of rental/critical machine(s) in the manufacturing (fellowship) environment. The concept of logical sorting and partial sequencing is used to develop the new meta-heuristic, which works on the principle of idle time reduction. The ultimate objective of the proposed meta-heuristic is to minimize the overall time of the manufacturing process with a minimum idle time of rental/critical machine(s). The performance of the proposed meta-heuristic is compared with CDS method and stated that it has achieved 96.7% closer to the CDS method in elapsed time with a zero idle time of the critical machine.