Two-machine flowshop scheduling in a physical examination center

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate two important operational processes of the physical examination center as a group scheduling problem in two-machine flowshop. The objective is to minimize the makespan. We first analyze the complexity of the problem with a fixed number of release dates and present a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm. Then we provide an approximation algorithm and analyze its worst-case error bounds for the problem with two release dates and an optimal algorithm for a very practical special case of the problem.