Abstract: | The flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent additive setup times is considered as a special case of the general problem, and a polynomially bounded approximate method is developed to find a minimum makespan permutation schedule. The approximate algorithm is shown to yield optimal results for the two-machine case. A version of Sule's model is defined that produces the first approximation of the optimal solution for this problem. Computational experience along with numerical examples are provided to test the effectiveness of the method. |