Abstract
In this paper, sufficient conditions are presented to decide the precedence relation between neighboring two jobs by means of adjacent pairwise interchange methods for minimizing mean flow-time in n/m flow-shop scheduling. On the basis of the sufficient conditions, a computational algorithm is proposed for an optimal or near optimal solution. The mean flow-time obtained by this algorithm indicates an average approximation ratio of 86% over 160 examples. This algorithm can be executed within the time proportional to n×m^2,where n and m are the number of jobs and machines in turn.
