Flexible flow shop scheduling problem (FFS) with unrelated parallel machines contains sequencing in flow shop where, at any stage, there exists one or more processors. The objective consists of minimizing the maximum completion time. Because of NP-completeness of FFS problem, it is necessary to use heuristics method to address problems of moderate to large scale problem. Therefore, for assessme...

A frequently occurring operational problem is one of processing a given number of jobs (commodities) on a specified number of machines (facilities) referred to by various investigators as scheduling, dispatching, sequencing, or combinations thereof (Gupta and Stafford, 2006). In most manufacturing environments, a set of processes is needed to be serially performed in several stages before a job...

One of the earliest results in flow shop scheduling theory is an algorithm given by Johnson’s [1] for scheduling jobs on two or three machines to minimize the total elapsed time whenever the processing times of jobs are random. The present paper is an attempt to develop a heuristic algorithm for two stages specially structured flow shop scheduling in which the processing times of the jobs a...

In a shop floor of the industry, the routings which are based upon the jobs that need to be processed on different machines are one among the major activities and therefore the resource requirements are not based upon the quantity as in a flow shop but rather the routings for the products being produced. However, both job shop and flow shop production cope with a scheduling problem to find a fe...

Uncertainty plays a significant role in modeling and optimization of real world systems. Among uncertain approaches, fuzziness describes impreciseness while for ambiguity another definition is required. Vagueness is a probabilistic model of uncertainty being helpful to include ambiguity into modeling different processes especially in industrial systems. In this paper, a vague set based on dista...

The problem of makespan minimization in a flow shop with two machines when the input buffer of the second machine can only host a limited number c of parts is known to be NP-hard for any c > 0 and c ≤ n, where n is the number of jobs. In this paper we analyze this problem in the context of batch scheduling, i.e, when identical parts must be processed consecutively. In particular we study the ca...