INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH, vol.45, no.15, pp.3311-3331, 2007 (Journal Indexed in SCI)
This study considers a permutation flow shop-sequencing problem with synchronous transfers between stations. The objective is to minimize the makespan. It is shown that the problem is strongly NP-hard. A branch-and-bound algorithm together with several lower and upper bounding procedures are developed. The algorithm returns optimal solutions to moderate-sized problem instances in reasonable solution times.