A new branch-and-bound approach for the n/2/flowshop/αF + βCmax flowshop scheduling problem

In this study, a special situation involving a computationally difficult flowshop scheduling problem is discussed. The objective of this problem is to minimize a weighted combination of job flowtime and schedule makespan. An efficient Branch-and-Bound approach is developed here to solve this problem. The primary reason for developing this Branch-and-Bound approach is that its results can usefully guide other heuristic techniques, such as simulated annealing, tabu search, and genetic algorithms, in finding optimal or good quality solutions to larger sized problems. As evidence of the utility of the proposed approach, we present extensive computational results on random test problems. Our results compare favorably with previously developed algorithms in the literature.