《1998 Reduction of job-shop problems to flow-shop problems with precedence constraints》.pdf

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH European Journal of Operational Research 109( 1998) 96-I IO Theory and Methodology Reduction of job-shop problems to flow-shop problems with precedence constraints Alain Guinet *, Marie Legrand INSA de Lyon, Laboratoire PRISMa / LISPI, Groupe de Recherches en Productique lnformatique des Sysdmes Manufacturiers. GPR - Biitiment 403, 20 Avenue Albert Einstein, 69621 Villeurbanne, France Received 1November 1994;accepted 1March 1997 Abstract We study the problem of scheduling N independent jobs in a job-shop environment. Each job must be processed on A4 machines according to individual routes. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time of the jobs. First, the job-shop problem is reduced to a flow-shop problem with job precedence constraints. Then, a set of flow-shop algorithms are modified to solve it. To evaluate the quality of these heuristics, several lower bounds on the optimal solution have been computed and compared with the heuristic solutions for 3040 problems. The heuristics appear especially promising for job-shop problems wi