A new branch and bound algorithm for minimizing mean tardiness in two-machine flowshops

Abstract We consider the two-machine flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing mean tardiness. Presented are several properties that are used to calculate lower bounds on total tardiness of jobs for a given partial sequence and to identify sequences dominated by others. We develop a branch and bound algorithm using these bounds and dominance rule. This algorithm is compared with an existing algorithm on randomly-generated test problems.

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