A Branch-and-Bound Algorithm forthePermutation FlowShopScheduling ProblemSubject toRelease DatesandDelivery Times

Weconsider theproblem ofminimising themakespan inanm-machine flowshopsubject torelease dates anddelivery times whichrequires scheduling njobs through m machines whichareplaced inseries. Thisproblem isknowntobe NP-hard. Wepropose anewbranch-and-bound algorithm whichencompasses several features including aprocedure for adjusting heads andtails, heuristics, andalower bounding procedure whichisbased ontheexact solution ofthetwomachine flowshopproblem withtimelags, ready times, anddelivery times. We present extensive computational experiments ontwosets ofproblems, withupto6000operations, whichshowthat theproposed algorithm solves largescale instances inmoderate CPUtime.