A two-machine flowshop scheduling problem with a truncated sum of processing-times-based learning function

Scheduling with learning effects has received continuing attention in the recent days. However, it can be found that the actual processing time of a given job drops to zero precipitously as the job has a big processing time or the number of jobs increases. Moreover, most researchers paid more attention to single-machine settings, and the flowshop settings then are relatively unexplored. Motivated by these observations, we consider a two-machine total completion time flowshop problem in which the actual job processing time is a function depending on the jobs that have already been processed and a control parameter. In this paper, we develop a branch-and-bound and a genetic heuristic-based algorithm for the problem. In addition, the experimental results of all proposed algorithms are also provided. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.