The pharmaceutical industry is quite restrictive concerning quality and safety, the manufacturing disruptions often lead to drug shortages in despite of the high costs involved. Due to the minimization of equipment costs, the design and scheduling of chemical batch processes (DSCBP) is a well-known problem, and various sub-problems are selected from the literature because they were successively enlarging the design and schedule policies: single machine or multiple machines (S or M) in each stage; and single product campaigns or multiple products campaigns (S PC or M PC). In this paper, four problems are studied (by combinatorics: SS, MS, SM, and MM) and it is shown that they are all NP-hard in strong sense through polynomial reduction. This study can support innovative algorithms and methodologies for solving DSCBP problems, in a way to improve equipments sizing and configurations design, and thereby contributing to curb disruptions within pharmaceutical supply chains (PharmSC). (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.