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A combination of flow shop scheduling and the shortest path problem

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Abstract

This paper studies a combinatorial optimization problem which is obtained by combining the flow shop scheduling problem and the shortest path problem. The objective of the obtained problem is to select a subset of jobs that constitutes a feasible solution to the shortest path problem, and to execute the selected jobs on the flow shop machines to minimize the makespan. We argue that this problem is NP-hard even if the number of machines is two, and is NP-hard in the strong sense for the general case. We propose an intuitive approximation algorithm for the case where the number of machines is an input, and an improved approximation algorithm for fixed number of machines.

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Acknowledgments

This study has been supported by the Bilateral Scientific Cooperation Project BIL10/10 between Tsinghua University and KU Leuven, and Wang’s research work has been supported by NSFC No. 11371216.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematical Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Kameng Nip & Zhenbo Wang

  2. Research Foundation–Flanders, ORSTAT, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Fabrice Talla Nobibon

  3. ORSTAT, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Roel Leus

Authors
  1. Kameng Nip
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  2. Zhenbo Wang
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  3. Fabrice Talla Nobibon
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  4. Roel Leus
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhenbo Wang.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper has appeared in the Proceedings of 19th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON’13), LNCS, vol. 7936, pp. 680–687.

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Nip, K., Wang, Z., Talla Nobibon, F. et al. A combination of flow shop scheduling and the shortest path problem. J Comb Optim 29, 36–52 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-013-9670-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-013-9670-4

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