Scheduling jobs with release dates on parallel batch processing machines to minimize the makespan

摘要

Batch processing happens in many different industries, in which a number of jobs are processed simultaneously as a batch. In this paper we develop two heuristics for the problem of scheduling jobs with release dates on parallel batch processing machines to minimize the makespan and analyze their worst-case performance ratios. We also present a polynomial-time optimal algorithm for a special case of the problem where the jobs have equal processing times.