A note on scheduling flowshops with flexible stage ordering

We develop an asymptotically optimal heuristic for the m-stage flowshop problem with flexible stage ordering. Our algorithm supplies a job permutation which has the same worst case absolute bound for all possible m! orderings of the m stages. The development of our algorithm is motivated by the observation that it is sometimes beneficial to reverse the processing order in multi-stage manufacturing processes. Our algorithm facilitates the development of a job sequence a priori before the processing order is determined.