Article ID: | iaor20021709 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 4 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 25 |
End Page Number: | 51 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2001 |
Journal: | Journal of Scheduling |
Authors: | Strusevich V.A., Potts Chris N., Tautenhahn T. |
Keywords: | batching |
We consider the problem of scheduling independent jobs on two machines in an open shop, a job shop and a flow shop environment. Both machines are batching machines, which means that several operations can be combined into a batch and processed simultaneously on a machine. The batch processing time is the maximum processing time of operations in the batch, and all operations in a batch complete at the same time. Such a situation may occur, for instance, during the final testing stage of circuit board manufacturing, where burn-in operations are performed in ovens. We consider cases in which there is no restriction on the size of a batch on a machine, and in which a machine can process only a bounded number of operations in one batch. For most of the possible combinations of restrictions, we establish the complexity status of the problem.