C Rajendran

Most algorithms on flowshop scheduling assume that every stage has a single processor or machine only. With a view to achieve the practical objective of minimizing total flowtime, a branch-and-bound algorithm for obraining a permutation schedule for the multi-stage flowshop with parallel processorsis presented. Computational experience with the proposed algorithm and the existing single-processor algorithms revelas that most of the parallel-processor problems are solved faster and easier. The performance of the existing procedures is also evaluated in the parallel-processor environment. Since the flowshop scheduling problem is NP-complete, a heuristic algorithm for scheduling in a two-stage parallel-processor flowshop is proposed. The heuristic solutions, when compared with the optimal solutions given by the proposed branch-and-bound method, are found to be near-optimal. © 1992.

In this article we present two heuristic algorithms for scheduling in the constrained or continuous flow shop to minimize total flow time of jobs. Two heuristic preference relations are used as the basis for job insertion to build up a schedule by the heuristics. When evaluated over a large number of problems of various sizes, the heuristics are found to be very effective in yielding near‐optimal solutions. Copyright © 1990 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company

The existing algorithms for optimizing the flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing makespan assume that every stage has a single processor. This paper relaxes this assumption and presents a branch-and-bound algorithms for scheduling in the flowshop with parallel processors. The computational experience on the working of the algorithm is also reported. © 1992.