Scheduling unrelated parallel batch processing machines with non-identical job sizes

摘要

Scheduling unrelated parallel batch processing machines to minimize makespan is studied in this paper. Jobs with non-identical sizes are scheduled on batch processing machines that can process several jobs as a batch as long as the machine capacity is not violated. Several heuristics based on best fit longest processing time (BFLPT) in two groups are proposed to solve the problem. A lower bound is also proved to evaluate the quality of the heuristics. Computational experiments were undertaken. These showed that J_SC-BFLPT, considering both load balance of machines and job processing times, was robust and outperformed other heuristics for most of the problem categories.