Batch scheduling of incompatible job families with sequence independent setup times

The problem of minimizing total tardiness on a batch processing machine with incompatible job families when there are sequence independent setup times between families is studied where all jobs of the same family have identical processing times and jobs of different families cannot be processed together. A batch processing machine can process a number of jobs, within a maximal batch size, simultaneously as a batch. The processing time required of each batch is equal to one of the jobs. A dynamic programming algorithm which gives the optimal solution, and several heuristics are presented. Performance of simple dispatching rules based on due dates are compared, and the best of them is used as an initial solution for the decomposition algorithm, which is shown to give good schedules in relatively short computational time.