| Abstract: | This paper considers the problem of scheduling a given number of jobs on a specified number of machines in a flowshop where the objective function is to minimize the total throughput time in which all jobs complete processing on all machines. Based on the combinatorial analysis of the problem, several simple algorithms are developed for solving special structure flowshop scheduling problems where the process times are not completely random, but bear a well-defined relationship to one another. The proposed algorithms are both simple and computationally efficient and can optimally solve large-sized problems even with manual computational devices. |
