Lot splitting to minimize average flow-time in two-machine flow-shop

Lot splitting is technique for accelerating the flow of work by splitting job lots into sublots. In this paper we investigate the lot splitting scheduling problem in two-machine flow-shop environment with detached setups and with batch availability. The performance measure considered is the average flow-time which is indicative of the increasingly important manufacturing lead-time. Our contribution is both theoretic and practical for the case of general ( not necessarily equal) sublots. We identify properties of the optimal solution and develop solution procedure to solve the problem. We then present computational study which indicates that our solution technique is very efficient.