The Robust Flow Shop

Abstract

In this chapter, job processing requirements are considered to be uncertain. They are no longer assumed to be deterministically known. One modeling approach would be to consider processing time probability distributions, and indeed this is done in a later chapter. Here, we provide a standard minimax regret approach, which however has been exploited very little in the context of scheduling. The limited research that has been conducted on this topic demonstrates that the minimax regret approach is particularly useful in scheduling problems because the corresponding solutions are quite robust on processing time variations. On a negative note, the available research indicates that this technique is at least a level of magnitude harder to deal with than its deterministic counterpart.