Total flowtime and makespan for a no-wait m-machine flowshop with set-up times separated

Abstract

This paper addresses the m-machine no-wait flowshop problem where the set-up time of a job is separated from its processing time. The performance measures considered are the total flowtime and makespan. The scheduling problem for makespan reduces to the travelling salesman problem (TSP), and the scheduling problem for total flowtime reduces to the time-dependent travelling salesman problem (TDTSP). Non-polynomial time solution methods are presented, along with a polynomial heuristic.

Keywords:

• scheduling
• flowshop
• no-wait
• heuristics
• integer programming
• travelling salesman