Çetinkaya, Ferda CanDuman, Mehmet2024-05-092024-05-092021Çetinkaya, Ferda Can; Duman, Mehmet. (2021). "Scheduling With Lot Streaming In A Two-Machine Re-Entrant Flow Shop", Operational Research in Engineering Sciences: Theory and Applications, Vol.4, No.3, pp.142-175.26201607http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12416/8225Lot streaming is splitting a job-lot of identical items into several sublots (portions of a lot) that can be moved to the next machines upon completion so that operations on successive machines can be overlapped; hence, the overall performance of a multi-stage manufacturing environment can be improved. In this study, we consider a scheduling problem with lot streaming in a two-machine re-entrant flow shop in which each job-lot is processed first on Machine 1, then goes to Machine 2 for its second operation before it returns to the primary machine (either Machine 1 or Machine 2) for the third operation. For the two cases of the primary machine, both single-job and multi-job cases are studied independently. Optimal and near-optimal solution procedures are developed. Our objective is to minimize the makespan, which is the maximum completion time of the sublots and job lots in the single-job and multi-job cases, respectively. We prove that the single-job problem is optimally solved in polynomial-time regardless of whether the third operation is performed on Machine 1 or Machine 2. The multi-job problem is also optimally solvable in polynomial time when the third operation is performed on Machine 2. However, we prove that the multi-job problem is NP-hard when the third operation is performed on Machine 1. A global lower bound on the makespan and a simple heuristic algorithm are developed. Our computational experiment results reveal that our proposed heuristic algorithm provides optimal or near-optimal solutions in a very short time.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessLot StreamingMakespanRe-Entrant Flow ShopSchedulingTwo-MachineArticle4314217510.31181/ORESTA111221142C