The problem of scheduling n independent jobs on serial stages with identical parallel machines at each stage is considered. Each job lot is allocated evenly to all machines at each stage for processing, and moved in transfer batches between stages. This scheduling strategy is called an identical production pattern. The objective is to find a permutation schedule that minimizes makespan. A branch and bound algorithm is suggested to find an optimal permutation schedule for a transformed problem. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the branch and bound algorithm. Computational results for 640 problems generated randomly show that within a reasonable time the suggested algorithm can be used for transfer batch scheduling in a flexible flowshop.
