UNIT SIZED TRANSFER BATCH SCHEDULING WITH SETUP TIMES

Transfer batch scheduling permits the movement of some portion of a job or lot at downstream stages before the entire job is completed at the current stage. This paper considers the two stage flow shop problem of minimizing the total completion time, in which all transfer batches are of unit size for each job. An optimal solution procedure is developed for unit sized transfer batch scheduling with setup times which are independent of the sequence and are separated from the processing times at both stages.