Flow shop scheduling with lot streaming

Lot streaming is the process of splitting a job into sublots so that its operations can be overlapped. This paper deals with the problem of minimizing the length of a flow shop schedule when lot streaming is invoked. The paper shows when it is sufficient in the one-job model to use the same sublot sizes for all machines, and it analyzes the use of equal-sized sublots as a heuristic procedure. Finally, the paper demonstrates some of the difficulties involved in the n-job problem.