Minimization of total tardiness on unrelated parallel machines with sequence- and machine-dependent setup times under due date constraints

Abstract

The unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence- and machine-dependent setup times in the presence of due date constraints represents an important but relatively less-studied scheduling problem in the literature. In this study, a simple iterated greedy (IG) heuristic is presented to minimize the total tardiness of this scheduling problem. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed IG heuristic are compared with existing algorithms on a benchmark problem dataset used in earlier studies. Extensive computational results indicate that the proposed IG heuristic is capable of obtaining significantly better solutions than the state-of-the-art algorithms on the same benchmark problem dataset with similar computational resources.