Minimizing flow time in cyclic schedules for identical jobs with acyclic precedence: the bottleneck lower bound

This paper studies minimizing the #ow time of a cyclic schedule for repeated identical jobs, where one job is started/completed in each cycle, subject to the schedule achieving maximum throughput. We propose a branch and bound method for a single machine problem, and use this method to derive an improved lower bound for the multiple machine problem. c © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.