Customer order scheduling problems with a fixed machine-job assignment

This paper considers a variation of the customer order scheduling problem, and the variation is the case where the machine-job assignment is fixed. We examine the parallel machine environment, and the objective is to minimize the sum of the completion times of the batches. While a machine can process only one job at a time, different machines can simultaneously process different jobs in a batch. The recognition version of this problem is known to be NP-complete in the strong sense even if there exist only two parallel machines. When there are an arbitrary number of parallel machines, we establish three lower bounds and develop a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm which runs in exponential time on the number of batches. We present two simple but intuitive heuristics. SB and GR, and find some special cases where SB and GR generate an optimal schedule. We also find worst case upper bounds on the relative error. For the case of the two parallel machines, we show that GR generates an optimal schedule when processing times of all batches are equal. Finally, the heuristics and the lower bounds are empirically evaluated.