Scheduling for a Two-Machine, M-Parallel Flow Shop to Minimize Makesan

This paper considers the problem of two-machine, M-parallel flow shop scheduling to minimize makespan, and proposes a series of heuristic algorithms and a branch and bound algorithm. Two processing times of each job at two machines on each line are identical on any line. Since each flow-shop line consists of two machines, Johnson's sequence is optimal for each flow-shop line. Heuristic algorithms are developed in this paper by combining a "list scheduling" method and a "local search with global evaluation" method. Numerical experiments show that the proposed heuristics can efficiently give optimal or near-optimal schedules with high accuracy. with high accuracy.