Three-machine open shop with a bottleneck machine revisited

Abstract

The paper considers the three-machine open shop scheduling problem to minimize the makespan. In the model, each job consists of two operations, one of which is to be processed on the bottleneck machine, which is the same for all jobs. A new linear-time algorithm to find an optimal non-preemptive schedule is developed. The suggested algorithm considerably simplifies the only previously known method as it straightforwardly exploits the structure of the problem and its key components to yield an optimal solution.