Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
723808 IFAC Proceedings Volumes 2006 5 Pages PDF
Abstract

We consider the two-machine flow shop scheduling problem to minimize the makespan, provided that the jobs have to be transported between the machines by a single transporter or carrier. The transporter may take an arbitrary number of jobs at a time. For this NP-hard problem, we describe a heuristic that behaves as a ***6/5–approximation algorithm, provided that there exists an optimal schedule with exactly two shipments. The obtained result should be viewed as a necessary step towards an algorithm with a better worst-case behaviour than a ***3/2–approximation algorithm by Lee and Strusevich (2005).

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Engineering Computational Mechanics