Scheduling of Three-Operation Jobs in a Two-Machine Flow Shop with mean flow time measure

This paper considers a two-machine flow-shop scheduling problem for minimizing mean flow time. Each job has three non-preemptive operations, where the first and third operations must be Processed on the first and second machines, respectively, but the second operation can be processed on either machine. A lower bound based on SPT rule is derived, which is then used to develop a branch-and-bound algorithm. Also, an efficient simple heuristic algorithm is developed to generate a near-optimal schedule. Numerical experiments are performed to evaluate the performances of the proposed branch-and-bound and the heuristic algorithm