Flow shop scheduling with a batch processor and limited buffer

Abstract

This paper addresses flow shop scheduling problem with a batch processor followed by a discrete processor. Incompatible job families and limited buffer size are considered, and the objective is to determine a schedule such that the total completion time is minimised. Flexible buffer service policy is designed, and a greedy heuristic together with the worst-case analysis is developed. We also propose a hybrid method involving a Differential Evolution algorithm. Moreover, two tight lower bounds are provided to measure the performances of the proposed algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are capable of providing high-quality solutions for large-scale problems within a reasonable computational time.