It is shown that the two machine preemptive job-shop problem with mean flow-time or makespan objective function and three jobs is NP-hard. This contrasts the fact that the nonpreemptive versions of these problems are polynomially solvable if the number of jobs is arbitrary but fixed. It is also...

The paper surveys the complexity results for job shop, flow shop, open shop and mixed shop scheduling problems when the number n of jobs is fixed while the number r of operations per job is not restricted. In such cases, the asymptotical complexity of scheduling algorithms depends on the number...