Transfer Lags in the Flow Shop

Abstract

We define the types of transfer lags, positive and negative, between stages of a flow shop, and discuss applications (transport times, nonbottleneck machines, manufacturing cells, batch transfers, setup and teardown times, master-slave systems, etc.). We show that the twomachine makespan problem is NP-hard, but that a variety of models can be efficiently solved using the Modified Johnson's Rule and its extensions when our search is restricted to permutation schedules. We extend the analysis to the two-stage hybrid shop, and then to the m machine shop, for which bounds and heuristics are given. Further results involving transfer lags are given in Chap. 4.