Minimizing the number of tardy jobs on a proportionate flowshop with general position-dependent processing times

In various real life scheduling systems job processing times vary according to the number of jobs previously processed. The vast majority of studies assume a restrictive functional form to describe job processing times. In this note, we address a scheduling problem with the most general job processing time functions. The machine setting assumed is an m-machine proportionate flowshop, and the objective function is minimum number of tardy jobs. We show that the problem can be formulated as a bottleneck assignment problem with a maximum cardinality constraint. An efficient polynomial time (O(n4 log n)) solution is introduced.