Earliness-tardiness minimization on scheduling a batch processing machine with non-identical job sizes

This paper considers a scheduling problem for minimizing the sum of the absolute deviations of completion times from the due dates of all jobs (earliness-tardiness) on a single batch processing machine. For this problem, each job has a corresponding processing time and size and all jobs have the common due date. The problem under study is NP-hard and hence a hybrid genetic algorithm based on a new heuristic algorithm for batch forming is proposed. Random instances are designed to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms addressed in the literature.