Sameer Sharma
A bicriteria two stage flow shop scheduling is addressed to minimize the makespan and the rental cost of the machines under specified rental policy simultaneously. The processing times, independent setup times of the jobs are associated with their respective probabilities. Further the jobs are processed in a string of disjoint job-blocks. The study gives an optimal schedule rule to optimize the bicriteria through heuristic approach. The two criteria of minimizing the maximum utilization of the machines or rental cost and minimizing the maximum makespan are one of the combinations of our objective function reflecting the performance measure. A computer programme followed by a numerical illustration is given to substantiate the algorithm.