Variable neighborhood search approaches for scheduling jobs on parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times, precedence constraints, and ready times

In this paper, we discuss a scheduling problem for jobs on identical parallel machines. Ready times of the jobs, precedence constraints, and sequence-dependent setup times are considered. We are interested in minimizing the performance measure total weighted tardiness that is important for achieving good on-time delivery performance. Scheduling problems of this type appear as subproblems in decomposition approaches for large scale job shops with automated transport of the jobs as, for example, in semiconductor manufacturing. We suggest several variants of variable neighborhood search (VNS) schemes for this scheduling problem and compare their performance with the performance of a list based scheduling approach based on the Apparent Tardiness Cost with Setups and Ready Times (ATCSR) dispatching rule. Based on extensive computational experiments with randomly generated test instances we are able to show that the VNS approach clearly outperforms heuristics based on the ATCSR dispatching rule in many situations with respect to solution quality. When using the schedule obtained by ATCSR as an initial solution for VNS, then the entire scheme is also fast and can be used as a subproblem solution procedure for complex job shop decomposition approaches.