XII

We investigate the stochastic flow shop problem with m machines and general distributions for processing times. No analytic method exists for solving this problem, so we looked instead at heuristic methods. We devised three constructive procedures with modest computational requirements, each based on approaches that have been successful at solving the deterministic counterpart. We compared the ...

Purpose – In order to achieve excellence in manufacturing, goals like lean, economic and quality production with enhanced productivity play a crucial role in this competitive environment. It also necessitates major improvements in generally three primary technical areas: variation reduction, equipment reliability, and production scheduling. Complexity of the real world scheduling problems also ...

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date...

Available online 18 August 2009

Ideal schedules minimize both maximum completion time and total completion time of jobs. This paper presents polynomial-time algorithms finding ideal nonpreemptive and preemptive two-machine schedules of jobs with arbitrary release dates and precedence constraints and unit-execution-time operations on identical parallel machines, in a flow shop and an open shop. Heretofore, the complexity statu...

Shop scheduling problems are known to be notoriously intractable, both in theory and practice. In this paper we give a randomized approximation algorithm for flow shop scheduling where the number of machines is part of the input problem. Our algorithm has a multiplicative factor of 2(1 + δ) and an additive term of O(m ln(m+ n)pmax)/δ ).