A two-machine flowshop scheduling problem with deteriorating jobs and blocking

Scheduling with deteriorating jobs has received increasing attention in recent years. Moreover, the machines are assumed to have unlimited intermediate buffers. In this paper, we study the two-machine deteriorating jobs flowshop problem with blocking where the objective is to minimize the makespan. A branch-and-bound algorithm incorporating with several dominance rules and a lower bound is provided to derive the optimal solution. In addition, several heuristic algorithms are also developed for near-optimal solution. Finally, a computational experiment is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms.