Abstract—This paper pertain to a specially structured njobs,3- machines flow shop scheduling in which the processing times are associated with probabilities to minimize the rental cost of the machines. Further the expected processing times are not random but bear a well defined relationship to one another. Many heuristics approaches have already been discussed in literature to minimize the makespan. But, in many cases minimization of makespan does not lead to minimum rental cost of the machines under a specified rental policy. The present work is an attempt to develop a heuristic algorithm to minimize the rental cost of the machines under a specified rental policy and will provide an important tool for the decision makers.

Index Terms—Specially structured flow shop scheduling; processing time; rental cost; idle time; makesspan; utiliztaiontime.

D. Gupta and S. Bala are with Department of Mathematics, M. M. University, Mullana, Ambala, India (email:samsharma31@yahoo.com).
S. Sharma is with Department of Mathematics, D.A.V.College, Jalandhar, Punjab, India.

Cite: Deepak Gupta, Sameer Sharma, and Shashi Bala, "Specially Structured Three Stage Flowshop Scheduling to Minimize the Rental Cost," International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics  vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 156-158, 2012.