Abstract
This article examines the problem of scheduling preemptive open shops to minimize the total completion time. The problem is known to be NP-hard. An efficient constructive heuristic is developed for solving large sized problems. A new lower bound scheme based on the solution of another special type of preemptive open shop problem is presented. Both of the proposed upper and lower bounds are incorporated into a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve medium sized problems. Computational results are reported. The branch-and-bound algorithm can handle problems of up to 14 jobs and 14 machines in size within a reasonable amount of time. The solution obtained by the heuristic has an average deviation of less than 0.14% from the optimal value, while the initial lower bound has an average deviation of less than 2.12% from the optimal value. Moreover, the heuristic finds approved optimal solutions for over 70% of the problem instances completely solved.
Published Version
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