The complexity of two group scheduling problems

The problems of scheduling groups of jobs under the group technology assumption are studied. The two remaining open questions posed in the literature a decade ago about the computational complexity of these problems are answered. The parallel machine problem to minimize the total job completion time is proved to be NP-hard in the strong sense, even if group set-up times are equal to zero. A dynamic programming algorithm is presented to solve this problem, which is polynomial if the number of machines is fixed. The two-machine open-shop problem to minimize the makespan is proved to be NP-hard in the ordinary sense, even if there are zero group set-up times and equal job processing times on both machines. It is shown that the latter problem under the condition that any group can be split into batches does not reduce to the problem where the splittings are not allowed, i.e., the group technology assumption is satisfied.