Deepak Gupta, Shashi Bala and Payal Singla
This paper is an attempt to develop a new heuristic algorithm, an alternative to the traditional algorithm proposed by Johnson (1954) to find the optimal schedule of jobs to minimize the utilization time of the machines and hence, their rental cost for two stage specially structured flow shop scheduling under specified rental policy in which processing times, set up times are associated with their respective probabilities including weightage of jobs. In most of literature the processing times are always considered to be random, but there are significant situations in which processing times are not merely random but bear a well defined structural relationship to one another. A numerical illustration is given to support the algorithm.
