Sequencing of jobs in some production system

We consider a real-life problem of scheduling clients orders in the production of concrete blocks in a factory of building industry. This problem can be modelled as a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with mixed no-wait/no-store constraints and mixed bottleneck/non-bottleneck machines. The objective function is to minimize maximum completion time. To solve the problem, we propose an approximation algorithm based on the tabu search approach. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.