Abadi and Sriskandarajah (1995) described the blocking flowshop problem as
follows. The flowshop has no intermediate buffer therefore a job cannot leave a
machine until the next machine downstream is free. If that is not the case, the job
(and the machine as well) is said to be blocked. Aldowaisan and Allahverdi (1998)
described the case in which once a job begins its processing on machine 1 of the
production line, that job must continue without delay to be processed on each of the
m machines in line. Not only are there no integer stage buffers to hold delay jobs, but
also no job may wait on one machine until the subsequent machine in line is free to
begin processing on that job. Aldowaisan and Allahverdi (1998) refer to this as the
no-wait flowshop problem. More recently (2003)