The Two-stage Assembly Flow Shop Scheduling with an Availability Constraint: Worst Case Analysis

In this paper, we deal with the two-stage assembly flow shop scheduling problem with an availability constraint. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time of the jobs (i.e. makespan). We are interested in the nonresumable model. We provide two heuristics with tight worst-case ratio bound of 2 when the availability constraint is imposed on one of the first stage’s machines. For the case where the gap is imposed on the assembly machine we show that no polynomial heuristic algorithm with finite error bound can be found.