| Summary: | This thesis presents a thorough introduction to flow shop problems with synchronous movement which are a variant of a non-preemptive permutation flow shop. Jobs have to be moved from one machine to the next by an unpaced synchronous transportation system, which implies that the processing is organized in synchronized cycles. This means that in each cycle the current jobs start at the same time on the corresponding machines and after processing have to wait until the last job is finished. Afterwards, all jobs are moved to the next machine simultaneously. In this thesis flow shops with synchronous movement are systematically embedded into the flow shop scheduling framework. The problem is defined for the most common objective functions as well as for many extensions and additional constraints that can be observed in real world applications. The thesis offers an extensive study of complexity of the discussed problems. Several exact and heuristic solution algorithms are proposed and evaluated. Further, a project in cooperation with a practitioner where flow shops with synchronous movement and resource constraints appear in a real world application is discussed. The results of the implemented heuristic approach are compared to the actual production of the industrial partner.
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