Unrelated Parallel Machines Scheduling with Resource-Assignable Sequence Dependent Setup Times

Setup operations on machines usually need of tooling and/or personnel to be carried out. Therefore, the length of the setup might not only depend on the machine and job sequence, but also on the number of resources assigned. This situation is common in real problems arising in several industries where setup operations in production lines are frequent. These operations are indeed setups whose length can be reduced or extended according to the number of resources assigned to them. We deal with an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with a linear combination of total completion time and the total number of resources assigned as an objective. We present a MIP model and some fast dispatching heuristics. We carry out computational experiments to study what characteristics of the problem affect the MIP model performance and to the effectiveness the different heuristics proposed.