Two machine Flow shop with transportation time.

Abstract

We present a scheduling problem of the flow-shop type. We introduce a transportation system: robot or conveyor. This transportation system is also involved in machine loading and unloading. The studied workshop consists of two machines and a conveyor that must process a set of tasks. Tasks having just been executed wait for the conveyor to be transported. The objective is to determine a feasible schedule with minimal makespan. The general problem being NP-hard, we prove that two special cases of this problem are polynomially solvable. We also present heuristics for the solution of the general problem with numerical