The three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem

We consider the three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the makespan. The three-stage assembly problem generalizes both the serial three machine flowshop problem and the two-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem and is therefore strongly NP-hard. We analyze the worst-case ratio bound for several heuristics for this problem. We also analyze the worst-case absolute bound for a heuristic based on compact vector summation techniques and we point out that, for a large number of jobs, this heuristic becomes asymptotically optimal. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.