A two-machine flowshop scheduling problem with precedence constraint on two jobs

作者:Cheng, Shuenn-Ren; Yin, Yunqiang; Wen, Chih-Hou; Lin, Win-Chin; Wu, Chin-Chia*; Liu, Jun
来源:Soft Computing, 2017, 21(8): 2091-2103.
DOI:10.1007/s00500-015-1908-x

摘要

Job precedence can be found in some real-life situations. For the application in the scheduling of patients from multiple waiting lines or different physicians, patients in the same waiting line for scarce resources such as organs, or with the same physician often need to be treated on the first-come, first-served basis to avoid ethical or legal issues, and precedence constraints can restrict their treatment sequence. In view of this observation, this paper considers a two-machine flowshop scheduling problem with precedence constraint on two jobs with the goal to find a sequence that minimizes the total tardiness criterion. In searching solutions to this problem, we build a branch-and-bound method incorporating several dominances and a lower bound to find an optimal solution. In addition, we also develop a genetic and larger-order-value method to find a near-optimal solution. Finally, we conduct the computational experiments to evaluate the performances of all the proposed algorithms.