Parallel machine scheduling considering a job-splitting property

Two meta-heuristics for parallel machine scheduling with job splitting to minimize total tardiness

“…This research is motivated by a practical need at a printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing system which was stated by Kim et al [4]. In this system, each job can be considered as an order for a PCB product, which is specified by the product type, production quantity (order size) and due date.…”

“…Shim and Kim [3] suggested a B&B algorithm for the identical machine scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total tardiness considering the job splitting property described by Kim et al. [4]. They developed dominance properties and lower bounds and used them in their B&B algorithm.…”

“…Kim et al [4], studied cases in which each job can be split into a discrete number of sub-jobs and they are processed on a parallel machine independently. They suggested a two-phase heuristic algorithm for the parallel machine scheduling problem with a job splitting property for the objective of minimizing total tardiness.…”

“…Although problems with due date-related performance measures were studied in many research articles, not much progress has been made for the objective of minimizing total tardiness in parallel machine scheduling problems except for special cases of identical parallel machines [3]. Furthermore, since it is not easy to obtain optimal solutions for parallel machine tardiness problems of a practical size, researchers have focused on the development of heuristic algorithms [4].…”

“…However, more set-ups may be required if there are more sub-jobs. Hence, in the scheduling problem considered in this study, it is very important to find an appropriate number of sub-jobs to be split from each job [4].…”