Two-Stage, Hybrid Flowshop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

This paper describes the two-stage flowshop problem when there are identical multiple machines at each stage, and shows that the problem is NP-complete. An efficient heuristic algorithm is developed for finding an approximate solution of a special case when there is only one machine at stage 2. The effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm in finding a minimum makespan schedule is empirically evaluated and found to increase with the increase in the number of jobs.