Article ID: | iaor20063310 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 167 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 796 |
End Page Number: | 809 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2005 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Strusevich Vitaly A., Billaut Jean-Charles, Esswein Carl |
Keywords: | flowshop, job shop |
In this paper, we consider the problem of providing flexibility to solutions of two-machine shop scheduling problems. We use the concept of group-scheduling to characterize a whole set of schedules so as to provide more choice to the decision-maker at any decision point. A group-schedule is a sequence of groups of permutable operations defined on each machine where each group is such that any permutation of the operations inside the group leads to a feasible schedule. Flexibility of a solution and its makespan are often conflicting, thus we search for a compromise between a low number of groups and a small value of makespan. We resolve the complexity status of the relevant problems for the two-machine flow shop, job shop and open shop. A number of approximation algorithms are developed and their worst-case performance is analyzed. For the flow shop, an effective heuristic algorithm is proposed and the results of computational experiments are reported.