Group scheduling in a two-stage flowshop

This paper investigates a two-stage flowshop group scheduling problem with the objective of minimising makespan (the completion time of the last job). In the multiple-stage group scheduling, each job is generally classified into one family by considering its characteristics at all stages as a whole. However, in this study, each job is classified into multiple families, one family per stage. For this problem, two heuristics based on the branch-and-bound algorithm are constructed and their efficiencies are investigated.