Scheduling flowshops with finite buffers and sequence-dependent setup times

In this paper we explore flowshop scheduling problems containing both sequence-dependent setup times and finite buffers. To the best of our knowledge, problems containing both of these complexities have not been addressed previously in the literature. The problem is clearly NP-hard and therefore we only consider heuristic solution methods. We propose a tabu search based solution procedure. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach relative to the other methods discussed.