Search

This research investigates the parallel-batching scheduling problems with a time-dependent learning effect where the job processing time is a decreasing function of its starting time. Both the single-machine and parallel-machine circumstances are considered, and the objective is to minimize the makespan. For the single parallel-batching machine scheduling problem, some structural properties and a heuristic algorithm are developed to solve it. Since the parallel-batching machines scheduling problem is NP-hard, a hybrid CS-JADE algorithm combining improved cuckoo search algorithm (CS) and self-adaptive differential evolution (DE) is proposed to solve this problem. The computational experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid algorithm performs well both in effectiveness and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of preemptive scheduling in a two-stage supply chain framework. The supply chain environment contains two stages: production and transportation. In the production stagejobs are processed on a manufacturer's bounded serial batching machine, preemptions are allowed, and set-up time is required before a new batch is processed. In the transportation stage each batch is delivered to a customer by a single vehicle. The objective is to minimize the makespan by making decisions for both mutually coordinated stages. Specifically, two versions are studied. The first one is that all jobs are available to be processed at time zero, and the second one is that jobs have different release times. Antime algorithm is developed for the first version, and we show that it can produce the optimal schedule for the entire problem. For the second version, based on some useful properties we have designed antime heuristic and a novel lower bound. The worst-case performance ratio of our algorithm is bounded by 2. Our computational study with random instances of different scales shows high-quality solutions for either small-scale or large-scale instances returned in a reasonable PC times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]