Specially structured two stage flowshop scheduling problem to minimize the Rental cost including arbitrary lags

Abstract

The present paper is attempt to develop an effective heuristic algorithm to two stage specially structured flow shop scheduling to minimize the rental cost as well as utilization time under pre-defined rental policy in which processing times are associated with respective probabilities including arbitrary lags i.e Start lag or Stop lag. In case of specially structured problem processing times are always considered to be random, but there are significant situations in which processing times are not merely random but bear a well defined structural relationship to one another. The proposed algorithm is justified with the help of numerical illustration.