Multiple bottleneck assignment problem

We consider the multiple bottleneck assignment problem which subsumes the well known min-sum and bottleneck assignment problems. The problem arises in the context of flexible manufacturing systems, where the objective is to maximize the throughput of a production system with several flow shops, running in parallel, to produce a product. The problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. We propose a new algorithm for obtaining sharp lower bounds to the optimal objective value. Computational experiments are conducted to show the improvement over existing methods.