Makespan distributions in flow shop scheduling

Concerns scheduling five jobs through a flow shop with five machines. The distribution of makespans and the distribution of the optimal makespans was obtained by complete enumeration of all the schedules. The effect of the processing times on these distributions was investigated. Three priority rules were evaluated as to their performance on minimizing the makespan. These rules were the ‘greatest total processing time’ first rule, the ‘least total processing time’ first rule and a ‘RANDOM’ assignment rule. Statistical tests were used to evaluate the efficacy of the rules.