Flexible job shop scheduling under availability constraints

In this paper, an exact geometric algorithm is presented for solving two-job sequencing and scheduling problems in flexible flow shop and job shop environments while the resources are (un)available in some time periods and processors (un)availability is the same in all work centers. This study seems utterly new and it is applicable to any performance measure based on the completion time. The investigated models are very close to the actual scheduling problems, because they envisage the flexible job shop environments, heads, set-up times, arbitrary number of unavailability periods on all resources, arbitrary number of work-centers, any kind of cross-ability, any kind of resume-ability and several types of performance measures. The proposed model is presented to solve two-job problems because it is a graphical approach. However, it is concluded that the idea can be extended to n-dimensional problems as well.