On the two-stage assembly flow shop problem

Numerous operational constraints within both industry and service sectors mandate the concurrent scheduling of tasks. This need is particularly evident in the assembly of products within manufacturing processes. This paper concentrates on minimizing makespan in the two-stage assembly flow shop problem. Our contributions include the introduction of novel dominance rules, a proposal for a heuristic method, and the development of a branch and bound algorithm. Additionally, we conduct an empirical analysis of makespan distribution for small-size instances. Through extensive experimentation, our study demonstrates the efficiency of the introduced dominance rules and the strong performance of the developed branch and bound algorithm.