Scheduling jobs with ready times and precedence constraints on parallel batch machines using metaheuristics

In this paper, we discuss a scheduling problem for parallel batch machines where the jobs have ready times. Problems of this type can be found in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (wafer fabs). In addition, we consider precedence constraints among the jobs. Such constraints arise, for example, in scheduling subproblems of the shifting bottleneck heuristic when complex job shop scheduling problems are tackled. We use the total weighted tardiness as the performance measure to be optimized. Hence, the problem is NP-hard and we have to rely on heuristic solution approaches. We consider a variable neighborhood search (VNS) scheme and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) to compute efficient solutions. We assess the performance of the two metaheuristics based on a large set of randomly generated problem instances and based on instances from the literature. The obtained computational results demonstrate that VNS is a very fast heuristic that quickly leads to high-quality solutions, whereas the GRASP is slightly outperformed by the VNS approach. However, the GRASP approach has the advantage that it can be parallelized in a more natural manner compared to VNS.