Sequencing flow shops with arbitrary intermediate storage

摘要

This paper deals with the deterministic flow shop problem and its connection with limited buffer storage. The system behaviour analysis in both transient and steady state enables one to estimate the mean gaps between ending and starting times of consecutive operations with respect to the same machine. In the proposed method, two-upper and lower bounds are gradually determined in order to carry out a near optimal jobs sequencing, minimizing the latest completion time criterion. Several tests made with uniformly distributed random data prove the efficiency of this method.