Solution algorithms for synchronous flow shop problems with two dominating machines

In this paper, we present solution algorithms for synchronous flow shop problems with two dominating machines. In such an environment, jobs have to be moved from one machine to the next by an unpaced synchronous transportation system, which implies that the processing is organized in synchronized cycles. This means that in each cycle the current jobs start at the same time on the corresponding machines and after processing have to wait until the last job is finished. Afterwards, all jobs are moved to the next machine simultaneously. Motivated by a practical application, we investigate the special case of two dominating machines where the processing times of all jobs on these two machines are at least as large as the processing times of all jobs on the other machines and hence always determine the cycle times. After formulating the considered problem as a special vehicle routing problem, we propose mixed integer linear programming formulations and a tabu search algorithm. Finally, we present computational results for randomly generated data and show the efficiency of the approaches.