Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling with Availability Constraints

The success of a product depends on the costs incurred through its entire processing. Indeed, an efficient schedule can significantly reduce the total costs. Most of the literature on scheduling assumes that machines are always available. However, due to maintenance activities machines cannot operate continuously without some unavailability periods. This chapter deals with scheduling a hybrid flow shop with availability constraints to minimize makespan. We investigate exact methods to solve two special cases of this problem to optimality. We formulate a dynamic programming to solve two-machine flow shop and a branch and bound algorithm to solve the two-stage hybrid flow shop.