Minimizing Cycle Time in a Blocking Flowshop
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider a blocking (i.e., bufferless) flowshop that repetitively processes a minimal part set to minimize its cycle time, or equivalently to maximize its throughput rate. The best previous heuristic procedure solves instances with 9 machines and 25 jobs, with relative errors averaging about 3% but sometimes as much as 10%. The idea of deliberately slowing down the processing of operations (i.e., increasing their processing times) establishes a precise mathematical connection between this problem and a no-wait flowshop. This enables a very effective heuristic for the no-wait flowshop to be adapted as a heuristic for the blocking flowshop. Our computational results show relative errors that average less than 2% for instances with 20 machines and 250 jobs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it