Flow-shop scheduling for three serial stations with the last two duplicate

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling jobs for three serial stations with the last two duplicate, i.e., identical. The performance measure considered is the makespan, and a Branch and Bound and two heuristic procedures are proposed. Two dominance criteria are developed to produce the optimal schedule for the jobs sequenced so far. Extensive computational experiments reveal that the Genetic Algorithm can be used to obtain a group of effective solutions for any realistic size problem within small computation time.