Minimizing Makespan in Flowshops with Pallet Requirements: Computational Complexity

Abstract

We establish the computational complexity of the problem of minimizing makespan in a flowshop, where each jobs requires a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense for m > =2 and K >= 3, and for m > =3 and K >= 2, where m is the number of machines and K is the number of pallets in the system.