Lot-sizing scheduling with batch setup times

This paper is concerned with scheduling independent jobs on m parallel machines in such a way that the makespan is minimized. Each job j is allowed to split arbitrarily into several parts, which can be individually processed on any machine at any time. However, a setup for uninterrupted sj time units is required before any split part of job j can be processed on any machine. The problem is strongly NP-hard if the number m of machines is variable and weakly NP-hard otherwise. We give a polynomial-time 5/3-approximation algorithm for the former case and a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the latter.