Flow Shop Scheduling

Most books on scheduling touch on flow shops only briefly, usually in a single chapter within a broader discussion of production systems. This monograph takes the opposite approach by devoting its full length to flow shops, gathering a large volume of material on the subject and organizing it by design features so that researchers and practitioners can locate the problem they need.

The text is divided into ten distinct flow shop systems and traces how they relate to one another. Coverage includes two-machine, flexible, and stochastic flow shops, along with other variants. Beyond the conventional flow shop, where each job passes through every stage only once, the book also treats the reentrant flow shop, in which a job can loop back and be processed again at the same station or a sequence of stations several times.

The authors write with a broad readership in mind, relying on streamlined notation and emphasizing concepts that tie the subfields together. The findings specific to flow shop research are presented as a foundation that may inspire work in other scheduling areas and in optimization more generally.