Parallel machine scheduling with a learning effect

Abstract

The phenomenon of ‘learning’ has been extensively studied in many different areas of Operational Research. However, the ‘learning effect’ of the producer/processor has rarely been studied in the general context of production scheduling, and has never been investigated in multi-machine scheduling settings. We focus in this paper on flow-time minimization on parallel identical machines. We show that this problem has a polynomial time solution, although the computational effort required is much larger than the effort required for solving the classical version of the problem.