Scheduling a single batch processing machine with non-identical job sizes

Abstract

The problem of scheduling jobs with non-identical capacity requirements or sizes on a single batch processing machine to minimize total completion time and makespan is studied. These problems are proven to be NP-hard and heuristics are developed for both, as well as a branch and bound algorithm for the total completion time problem. Computational experiments show that the heuristics are capable of rapidly obtaining near-optimal solutions.