Scheduling on identical machines with batch arrivals

In the scheduling literature, it is often assumed that jobs arrive either simultaneously or individually. However, this assumption is invalid in most practical situations because jobs usually arrive in batches, e.g., the final testing house in the manufacturing of semiconductor. The concept of batch arrivals has been mentioned in some studies, but it has not been explored from an operational viewpoint. This paper first addresses an identical parallel machine problem with batch arrivals to minimize the total completion time. Since the problem is NP-hard, a heuristic based on binary integer program is proposed. Computational results show that the proposed heuristic can efficiently obtain good solutions for medium and large size problems with an average percentage error of 2.12 from the lower bound.