Scheduling a two-stage no-wait hybrid flowshop with separated setup and removal times

This paper studies the two-stage no-wait hybrid flowshop scheduling problem where one of the two stages consists of several identical parallel machines and the setup and removal times of each job at each stage are separated from the processing time. In view of the NP-complete of this problem, heuristic algorithms regarding sequencing and assigning of jobs to each stage as independent procedure are proposed. Two theorems are also proposed for sequencing job procedure. Computational experience demonstrates the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm including the proposed theorems in finding a near optimal schedule.