Greedy heuristics for identical parallel machine scheduling problem with single server to minimize the makespan

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of scheduling a set of n independent jobs on m identical parallel machines with setup times constraints. Immediately before processing, each job must be loaded on a common server to perform the setup operation. During the loading operation, both the machine and the server are occupied. Two greedy heuristics are developed for (m ≥ 2) in order to minimize respectively the server waiting time and the machine idle time. These heuristics generalize those proposed in the literature for the case of two machines. The computational results show the efficiency of the proposed heuristics.