Abstract
We begin by reviewing many manufacturing and other applications of the flow shop with limited or no interstage storage. For two machines, we show the equivalence of no storage (blocking) and no waiting, which have a polynomial solution; for m > 2, we establish that the flow shop with blocking is NP-complete. An integer program is given to find the minimum makespan. A variety of bounds are presented. Branch-and-bound algorithms using these bounds are given and evaluated. Various heuristics and metaheuristics are presented and compared. Two different precedence graphs are introduced and used in the above developments. The total tardiness objective is also discussed.
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Emmons, H., Vairaktarakis, G. (2013). Blocking or Limited Buffers in Flow Shops. In: Flow Shop Scheduling. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 182. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5152-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5152-5_7
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