Scheduling ordered open shops (Q580167)

This paper examines special cases of the open shop problem in an attempt to define the boundary between easy and apparently hard, i.e. NP- complete, problems. The top result is: the minimizing makespan in an ordered three-machine open shop is NP-complete. This implies that many other open shop problems are also NP-complete. However, the authors show that a slight change in the assumptions of the problem may render a difficult problem easy to solve.