Single-machine equivalence and new formulations for the permutational flow shop sequencing problem with exact anticipation, delay, and intervals

We study the earliness-tardiness permutation flow shop scheduling problem with exact
delays, in which jobs are processed in the same order on all machines and must satisfy exact de-
lays between consecutive operations. The main contribution is to establish an equivalence between
this problem and the single-machine scheduling problem with earliness, tardiness, and sequence-
dependent setup times, allowing the original problem to be reinterpreted in a more compact mode-
ling space. Based on this equivalence, we propose two new mixed-integer programming formula-
tions. Computational results show that this approach yields formulations that outperform the best
formulations available in the literature.