Brute Force Method for Lot Streaming in FMS Scheduling Problems

Minimization of maximum production time (Makespan) in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) scheduling problems is an important objective and may result in good system performances. To realize a makespan close to the global minimum production time is a suitable goal for scheduling But answering the question how close this goal can be approached is a very complicated problem. In this paper bottleneck scheduling and Lot Streaming (LS) are used for a Job shop Scheduling Problem (JSP). The new contribution of the paper is applying a Brute Force Method (BFM) to LS. The effect of setup times is considered and numerical example is given.