A TWO-MACHINE MULTI-FAMILY FLOWSHOP SCHEDULING PROBLEM WITH TWO BATCH PROCESSORS

ABSTRACT

We consider a two-machine multi-family flowshop scheduling problem with non-identical capacity requirements or sizes on two batch processing machines. A batch processing machine is the one which can process a number of jobs simultaneously as a batch. Once the process begins, no job can be released from the batch processing machine until the entire batch is completely processed. The objective is to find a sequence of families and sequence of jobs in each family such that the makespan is minimized. A polynomial time algorithm is proposed for solving this problem and an illustrated example is also provided.

Keywords:

• flowshop
• multi-family
• batch processing machine
• makespan