Article ID: | iaor2008193 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 34 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 81 |
End Page Number: | 89 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2006 |
Journal: | OMEGA |
Authors: | Wu Tai-Hsi, Chen Jeng-Fung |
Keywords: | heuristics, heuristics: tabu search, optimization: simulated annealing |
This research deals with scheduling jobs on unrelated parallel machines with auxiliary equipment constraints. Each job has a due date and requires a single operation. A setup for dies is incurred if there is a switch from processing one type of job to another type. For a die type, the number of dies is limited. Due to the attributes of the machines and the fitness of dies to each, the processing time for a job depends on the machine on which the job is processed, each job being restricted to processing on certain machines. In this paper, an effective heuristic based on threshold-accepting methods, tabu lists, and improvement procedures is proposed to minimize total tardiness. An extensive experiment is conducted to evaluate the computational characteristics of the proposed heuristic. Computational experiences demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is capable of obtaining optimal solutions for small-sized problems, and significantly outperforms an ATCS procedure and a simulated annealing method for problems in larger sizes.