Minimizing makespan subject to budget limitation in hybrid flow shop

Flow shop production lines have been practiced for many years in manufacturing systems. Makespan is the total completion time of all the activities and is known as one of the most criteria in manufacturing systems. Minimizing this criteria causes more efficiently use of the resources specially machinery and manpower. By assigning some budget to some of the operations the operation time of these activities will be reduced and will affect the total completion time of all the operations (which is called makespan). In this paper this issue is practiced in hybrid flow shops. At first we convert hybrid flow shop to a network model and by using a linear programming approach it is identified in order to minimize makespan ( the total completion time of the network) which activities are better to absorb the predetermined and limited budget. Minimizing the total completion time of all the activities in the network is equivalent to minimizing makespan in production scheduling. The problem is solved by lindo and the result helps the decision maker to assign the budget to the desired operations.