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A variable neighborhood descent heuristic for the problem of makespan minimisation on unrelated parallel machines with setup times

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Abstract

The NP-hard problem of scheduling jobs on unrelated parallel machines, in the presence of machine-dependent and sequence-dependent setup times, with the objective of minimizing the makespan, is considered. A variable neighborhood descent search algorithm, hybridized with mathematical programming elements, is presented and its performance is evaluated on a large set of benchmark problem instances. The extensive computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms previously proposed methods in terms of solution quality as well as computation time.

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Correspondence to Krzysztof Fleszar.

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This research has been supported by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (Project TEXNO/0603/08—NETEXNOPRO).

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Fleszar, K., Charalambous, C. & Hindi, K.S. A variable neighborhood descent heuristic for the problem of makespan minimisation on unrelated parallel machines with setup times. J Intell Manuf 23, 1949–1958 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-011-0522-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-011-0522-8

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