Dispatching in flowshops with bottleneck machines

This paper addresses the problem of dispatching in flowshops with bottleneck machines. The presence of bottleneck machines results in the restricted throughput in flowshops. The objective is to develop dispatching rules for scheduling by taking into account the presence of bottleneck machines. The measures of performance are the minimization of total flowtime of jobs, the minimization of the sum of earliness and tardiness of jobs, and the minimization of total tardiness of jobs, considered separately. Many existing conventional dispatching rules and the proposed dispatching rules have been extensively investigated for their performance by generating a large number of problems of various sizes and bottleneck conditions. The results of the experimental investigation show that the proposed dispatching rules emerge to be superior to the conventional dispatching rules.