| Article ID: | iaor20003458 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 44 |
| Issue: | 6 |
| Start Page Number: | 899 |
| End Page Number: | 908 |
| Publication Date: | Nov 1996 |
| Journal: | Operations Research |
| Authors: | Weiss G., Ramudhin A., Bartholdi J.J., Calvin J.M., Vate J.H.V. |
| Keywords: | flowshop |
We study a two-machine flowshop in which all processing times are independently and identically distributed, with values known to the scheduler. We are able to describe in detail the expected behavior of the flowshop under optimal and heuristic schedules. Our results suggest that minimizing makespan might be a superfluous object: random schedules are easier to construct and require significantly less intermediate storage between the machines; moreover, they are known to be asymptotically optimal.