General flow-shop and job-shop problems

Abstract

In this chapter we consider general flow-shop and job-shop problems for which the number m of machines is variable. All these problems can be proved to be NP-complete from results in previous chapters; consequently the algorithms discussed in this chapter are mainly of the branch-and-bound type. We begin by discussing the general n|m|P|δ problem in section 6.1. Section 6.2 contains a brief discussion of the n|m|F|δ problem. In section 6.3 we turn to the general n|m|G|δ problem, concentrating on the classification and extension of possible approaches to the n|m|G|C_max problem. Chapter 6 concludes with section 6.4 on the n|m|δ, no wait|δ problem.