Two-Stage Flowshop Scheduling with Outsourcing Allowed

Abstract

In this paper we study the production-scheduling problem for a two-stage flow shop with outsourcing options. The maintenance of in-house machine and job-related discount for outsourcing cost are considered in model, in which total cost and makespan are regarded as bi-objective for the scheduling problem. Based on the analysis of model, we introduce a concept-packaging to reduce the complexity of problem and then develop heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Computational experiments using different groups of data are conducted to test the algorithm.