Computers and Operations Research, ( ISI ), Volume (39), No (7), Year (2012-7) , Pages (1652-1660)

Title : ( Two branch-and-bound algorithms for the robust parallel machine scheduling problem )

Authors: Mohammad Ranjbar , Morteza Davari , Roel Leus ,

Citation: BibTeX | EndNote

Abstract

Uncertainty is an inevitable element in many practical production planning and scheduling environments. When a due date is predetermined for performing a set of jobs for a customer, production managers are often concerned with establishing a schedule with the highest possible confidence of meeting the due date. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling a given number of jobs on a specified number of identical parallel machines when the processing time of each job is stochastic. Our goal is to find a robust schedule that maximizes the customer service level, which is the probability of the makespan not exceeding the due date. We develop two branch-and-bound algorithms for finding an optimal solution; the two algorithms differ mainly in their branching scheme. We generate a set of benchmark instances and compare the performance of the algorithms based on this dataset.

Keywords

Robust scheduling Identical parallelmachines Stochastic processingtimes