Benha University

Ibrahim Sabry Ibrahim Mahmoud

Asst. Professor

Faculty of Engineering, Benha Mechanical Engineering

Optimising batch scheduling on non-identical parallel machines: lower bounds, MIP, branch-and-price, and heuristics

International Journal of Production Research • 2025
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Publication Information
Authors Not Available
Keywords Production management, batch scheduling, lower bound,MI,branch-and-price heuristics
Journal International Journal of Production Research
Publisher Taylor
Volume Not Available
Issue Not Available
Pages 1–26
publication.type International
Paper Link Open Link
Supplementary Materials Not Available
Abstract
This paper addresses a scheduling problem involving a set of diverse jobs processed in batches. Each job has its own processing time and size. Notably, the processing time of any batch is determined by the longest processing time among the jobs it contains. These batches are scheduled on parallel machines with non-identical capacities, ensuring that the total size of the jobs in any batch does not exceed the capacity of the assigned machine. The objective is to minimise the maximum makespan across all machines, where the makespan is defined as the sum of the processing times of all batches on a machine. To tackle this problem, the paper proposes lower bounds, a mixed-integer programming formulation, and a branch-and-price algorithm. Additionally, five rule-based heuristics and a beam search algorithm are introduced. An extensive computational study demonstrates that the proposed solution methods outperform existing approaches in the literature in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed methods achieve best-known solutions for the first time in the literature, demonstrating their significant improvement over existing approaches.
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