Minimizing makespan on a batch-processing machine with non-identical [An article from: International Journal of Production Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from International Journal of Production Economics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper aims at minimizing the makespan for a batch-processing machine. The processing times and the sizes of the jobs are known. The machine can process a batch as long as its capacity is not exceeded. The processing time of a batch is the longest processing time of all the jobs in that batch. This problem is NP-hard and hence a genetic algorithm (GA) approach is proposed. Random instances were used to test the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results obtained from GA were compared with a simulated annealing approach and a commercial solver. The results indicate that the GA was able to arrive at better makespan with shorter run times.