Lot streaming with equal sublot in no-wait flowshops

We consider the problem of minimizing makespan in a no-wait flow-shop with an arbitrary number of machines. We assume that all sublots have the same number of items. We consider the cases with or without loading times. In both cases we show the existence of a critical machine which never remains idle. Then we get a set of general conditions on the processing times and loading times, which bind the number of sublots and the rank of the critical machine. © .