A two-stage flowshop scheduling with limited buffer storage

This study addresses a two-stage flowshop with a batch machine in stage 1 and a discrete machine in stage 2, subject to the constraint that the input buffer of the discrete machine can only host limited number of jobs. The batch machine processes a batch of jobs simultaneously, and the discrete machine processes one job at a time. The objective function of the problem is the makespan minimization. Several properties are proposed to solve the special case of the problem optimally. An effective heuristic is presented, and a branch-and-bound procedure is proposed for benchmarking. Extensive experimentation shows that the heuristic yields good results.