A Two-Stage Assembly-Type Flowshop Scheduling Problem for Minimizing Total Tardiness

This research considers a two-stage assembly-type flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the total tardiness. The first stage consists of two independent machines, and the second stage consists of a single machine. Two types of components are fabricated in the first stage, and then they are assembled in the second stage. Dominance properties and lower bounds are developed, and a branch and bound algorithm is presented that uses these properties and lower bounds as well as an upper bound obtained from a heuristic algorithm. The algorithm performance is evaluated using a series of computational experiments on randomly generated instances and the results are reported.