This paper surveys the literature related to solving traditional unrelated parallel-machine scheduling problems. It compiles algorithms for the makespan, total weighted sum of completion times, maximum tardiness, total tardiness, total earliness and tardiness, and multiple criteria performance measures. The review of the existing algorithms is restricted to the deterministic problems without se...

Total weighted tardiness is a measure of customer satisfaction. Minimizing it represents satisfying the general requirement of on-time delivery. In this research, we consider an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the problem of scheduling unrelated parallel machines to minimize total weighted tardiness. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Computational results show that th...

In this article, we consider the minimization of the total tardiness in a flexible job-shop. In our knowledge, this criterion is not previously studied for this type of shop configuration. The total tardiness criterion was mainly considered in the single machine problem (Chu [Chu92] and Souissi et al. [SKC04]). Few references studied this criterion in a job-shop configuration. The priority rule...

The single machine total weighted tardiness with release dates problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. With a new lower bounding scheme and a new upper bounding scheme, we get an efficient branch and bound algorithm. In the paper, we first introduce the history of the problem and its computational complexity. Second, the lower bounding schemes and the upper bounding schemes are described in de...

Quality control lead times are one of most significant causes of loss of time in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. This is partly due to the organization of laboratories that feature parallel multipurpose machines for chromatographic analyses. The testing process requires long setup times and operators are needed to launch the process. The various controls are non-preemptive and are ...

The traditional focus of scheduling research is on finding schedules with a low implementation cost. However, in many real world scheduling applications finding a robust or flexible schedule is just as important. A robust schedule is a quality schedule expected to still be acceptable if something unforeseen happens, while a flexible schedule is a quality schedule expected to be easy to change. ...