Palmer Scheduling for Continuous Fuzzy Domains of Task Time

The problems of scheduling multiple tasks on multiple resources are known as NPcomplete problems in their general form, and have long challenged researchers in this field due to their high degree of complexity. Heuristic approaches have thus been developed to solve them. In the past, the processing time for each job was usually assigned or estimated as a fixed value. In many real-world applications, however, job-processing time may vary dynamically. In the past, we discussed the Palmer scheduling algorithm for flow shops with more than two machines in discrete domains of membership functions. In this paper, we discuss the same kind of scheduling problems however in continuous domains of membership functions. The proposed fuzzy Palmer algorithm is also proven as a general case of the conventional Palmer algorithm with special membership functions assigned.