New lower bound for the hybrid flowshop scheduling problem

This paper deals with the hybrid flowshop scheduling problem (HFSP). We propose a new lower bound for the maximum completion time (makespan) criterion and a branch and bound procedure to solve a k-stage HFSP in which the maximum completion time is the criterion to be optimized. This problem has been already treated but we prove that our bound is better than those derived for the same criterion. To illustrate this dominance property, we propose experimental results in order to show the efficiency of this bound.