Heuristics for Non-Identical Parallel Machine Scheduling with Sequence Dependent Setup Times

Abstract

This research deals with a problem that minimizes makespan in a non-identical parallel machine system with sequence and machine dependent setup times and machine dependent processing times. We first present a new mixed integer programming formulation for the problem, and using this formulation, one can easily find optimal solutions for small problems. However, since the problem is NP-hard and the size of a real problem is large, we propose four heuristic algorithms including genetic algorithm based heuristics to solve the practical big-size problems in a reasonable computational time. To assess the performance of the algorithms, we conduct a computational experiment, from which we found the heuristic algorithms show different performances as the problem characteristics are changed and the simple heuristics show better performances than genetic algorithm based heuristics for the case when the numbers of jobs and/or machines are large. †