Minimizing total earliness and tardiness through unrelated parallel machine scheduling using distributed release time control

Using unrelated parallel machine scheduling to minimize the total earliness and tardiness of jobs with distinct due dates is a nondeterministic polynomial-hard problem. Delayed customer orders may result in penalties and reduce customer satisfaction. On the other hand, early completion creates inventory storage costs, which increase the total cost. Although parallel machines can increase productivity, machine assignments also increase the complexity of production. Therefore, the challenge in parallel machine scheduling is to dynamically adjust the machine assignment to complete the job within the shortest possible time. In this paper, we address an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem for jobs with distinct due dates and dedicated machines. The objective is to dynamically allocate jobs to unrelated parallel machines in order to minimize the total earliness and tardiness time. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and develop a modified genetic algorithm (GA) with a distributed release time control (GARTC) mechanism to obtain the near-optimal solution. A preliminary computational study indicates that the developed GARTC not only provides good quality solutions within a reasonable amount of time, but also outperforms the MILP model, a classic GA and heuristic approaches described in the literature.