Scheduling two-machine no-wait open shops to minimize makespan [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper examines the problem of scheduling two-machine no-wait open shops to minimize makespan. The problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. An exact algorithm, based on a branch-and-bound scheme, is developed to optimally solve medium-size problems. A number of dominance rules are proposed to improve the search efficiency of the branch-and-bound algorithm. An efficient two-phase heuristic algorithm is presented for solving large-size problems. Computational results show that the branch-and-bound algorithm can solve problems with up to 100 jobs within a reasonable amount of time. For large-size problems, the solution obtained by the heuristic algorithm has an average percentage deviation of 0.24% from a lower bound value.