Three stage constrained flow shop scheduling with jobs in a string of disjoint job-block

The objective of this paper is to develop a heuristic algorithm to minimize the total elapsed time for n jobs, 3 machine flow shop production scheduling in which processing times and independent set up times, each associated with probabilities including transportation time and breakdown interval. Further the jobs are processed in a string of disjoint job blocks. A computer programme followed by a numerical illustration is given to substantiate the algorithm.