1999 Volume 50 Issue 5 Pages 308-315
We consider a two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem minimizing makespan. The problem has some features, namely, i) a job in the upper stage can be split up into sub-jobs in the lower stage, and ii) time overlap production is permitted, which theoretical scheduling models have never contained. We regard it as a combinatorial optimization problem and propose methods of obtaining the lower boundary of makespan and an algorithm based on a branch and boundary method. We also discuss efficiency of the algorithm by computational experiments. The motivation for this research is a real scheduling problem in the processing industry.
