Heuristic and Exact Algorithms for the Identical Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem

  • Authors:
  • Mauro Dell'Amico;Manuel Iori;Silvano Martello;Michele Monaci

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell'Ingegneria (DISMI), Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 42100 Reggio Emilia, Italy;Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell'Ingegneria (DISMI), Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 42100 Reggio Emilia, Italy;Dipartimento di Eleltronica, Informatica e Sistemistica (DEIS), Università di Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione (DEI), Università di Padova, 40136 Padova, Italy

  • Venue:
  • INFORMS Journal on Computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Given a set of jobs with associated processing times, and a set of identical machines, each of which can process at most one job at a time, the parallel machine scheduling problem is to assign each job to exactly one machine so as to minimize the maximum completion time of a job. The problem is strongly NP-hard and has been intensively studied since the 1960s. We present a metaheuristic and an exact algorithm and analyze their average behavior on a large set of test instances from the literature. The metaheuristic algorithm, which is based on a scatter search paradigm, computationally proves to be highly effective and capable of solving to optimality a very high percentage of the publicly available test instances. The exact algorithm, which is based on a specialized binary search and a branch-and-price scheme, was able to quickly solve to optimality all remaining instances.