The Value of Processing Flexibility in Multipurpose Machines

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We study a scheduling problem in a multipurpose machine environment where every job can be processed by a subset of the machines operated in parallel, with the objective of minimizing makespan. We develop lower bounds, heuristic algorithms, and a branch-and-bound procedure. We perform an extensive computational experiment to assess how much flexibility is enough to render the multipurpose machine system equally efficient to an equivalent system of parallel identical machines. We find that very small amounts of flexibility appropriately distributed across processors provide nearly the same makespan performance as a system of fully flexible parallel machines.