Two-stage flow shop scheduling with dedicated machines

Abstract

This study is concerned with the manufacturing model that has a common machine at stage one and two parallel dedicated machines at stage two. All jobs need to be processed on the stage-one common machine. After the stage-one processing, the jobs of type 1 (type 2) will route to the first (second) dedicated machine at stage two. We first elaborate several published works on makespan minimisation which are not known to other streams of recent works. While the minimisation of maximum lateness is strongly NP-hard, we develop a linear-time algorithm to solve the case where two sequences of the two job types are given a priori.