Scheduling problems in connection with flexible production systems

The author discusses two scheduling problems derived from the area of flexible manufacturing. The first is a generalization of the classical job-shop problem in which there are machines equipped with different tools, which are able to process different types of operations. The second problem refers to batching. Algorithms and complexity results are presented for both classes of problems. In particular, an algorithm is developed that solves the batch-sizing problem for any batching problem with a given job sequence in O(n) time, where n is the number of jobs in the problem