Article ID: | iaor20071190 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 103 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 882 |
End Page Number: | 891 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2006 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Economics |
Authors: | Damodaran Purushothaman, Manjeshwar Praveen Kumar, Srihari Krishnaswami |
Keywords: | heuristics: genetic algorithms |
This paper aims at minimizing the makespan for a batch-processing machine. The processing times and the sizes of the jobs are known. The machine can process a batch as long as its capacity is not exceeded. The processing time of a batch is the longest processing time of all the jobs in that batch. This problem is NP-hard and hence a genetic algorithm (GA) approach is proposed. Random instances were used to test the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results obtained from GA were compared with a simulated annealing approach and a commercial solver. The results indicate that the GA was able to arrive at better makespan with shorter run times.