Makespan minimization for flow-shop problems with transportation times anda single robot

in a flow-shop problem with transportation times and a single robot n jobs consisting of m operations have to be processed in the same order on m mach ines. Additionally, transportation times are considered if a job changes fr om one machine to another. We assume that unlimited buffer space exists bet ween the machines and all transportations have to be done by a single robot . The objective is to determine a feasible schedule with minimal makespan. New complexity results are derived for special cases where the processing o r transportation times are constant values. Some of these may also be inter preted as new results for special cases of the classical 3-machine flow-sho p F3\\C-max with constant processing times at certain stages. (C) 2001 Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.