Purpose – In order to achieve excellence in manufacturing, goals like lean, economic and quality production with enhanced productivity play a crucial role in this competitive environment. It also necessitates major improvements in generally three primary technical areas: variation reduction, equipment reliability, and production scheduling. Complexity of the real world scheduling problems also ...

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Available online 18 August 2009

This paper provides an analysis of the efficacy of a known iterative improvement meta-heuristic approach from the AI area in solving the Blocking Job Shop Scheduling Problem (BJSSP) class of problems. The BJSSP is known to have significant fallouts on practical domains, and differs from the classical Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) in that it assumes that there are no intermediate buffers fo...

Ideal schedules minimize both maximum completion time and total completion time of jobs. This paper presents polynomial-time algorithms finding ideal nonpreemptive and preemptive two-machine schedules of jobs with arbitrary release dates and precedence constraints and unit-execution-time operations on identical parallel machines, in a flow shop and an open shop. Heretofore, the complexity statu...

Shop scheduling problems are known to be notoriously intractable, both in theory and practice. In this paper we give a randomized approximation algorithm for flow shop scheduling where the number of machines is part of the input problem. Our algorithm has a multiplicative factor of 2(1 + δ) and an additive term of O(m ln(m+ n)pmax)/δ ).

1 Efficient algorithms for max flow 1.1 Blocking flow and Dinic’s algorithm In this lecture, we’ll discuss about some other efficient algorithms for computing a maximum flow. They are based on the concept of a blocking flow. Definition 1 A flow f in G is blocking if every s-t path in G has some arc saturated. Every maximum flow is obviously also a blocking flow. Is every blocking flow a maximum...