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In this paper, a dry kiln scheduling problem from the furniture manufacturing industry is considered. Fz-ctory-specified due dates for orders, kiln availability, kiln capacity, and travel time from the kilns to the factories are all incorpo1,ated in a model which is formulated as an integer linear program. The objective of the formulation is to minimize the maximum tardiness of orders arriving at the plants by solving a special case of scheduling n independent jobs on m non-identical parallel nachines. Because of the computational complexity, and the fact that standard integer programming packages appear to perform very poorly on the problem, a heuristic approach is developed. Computational experience is provided which indicates that thc heuristic gives very high quality solutions to problems in near real-time.

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