A Branch-and-Bound Algorithm to Minimize the Makespan in a Flowshop with Blocking

This work addresses the minimization of the makespan criterion for the flowshop scheduling problem with blocking. In this environment there are no buffers between successive machines, and therefore intermediate queues of jobs waiting in the system for their next operations are not allowed. We propose a lower bound which exploits the occurrence of blocking. A branch-and-bound algorithm that uses this lower bound is described and its efficiency is evaluated on several problems. Results of computational experiments are reported.