Two-machine flow shop problem with unit-time operations and conflict graph

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling, on a two-machine flow shop, a set of unit-time operations subject to the constraints that some conflicting jobs cannot be scheduled simultaneously on different machines. In the context of our study, these conflicts are modelled by general graphs. The problem of minimising the maximum completion time (makespan) is known to be NP-hard in the strong sense. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model. Then, we develop a branch and bound algorithm based on new lower and upper bound procedures. We further provide a computer simulation to measure the performance of the proposed approaches. The computational results show that the branch and bound algorithm outperforms the MILP model and can solve instances of size up to 20,000 jobs.