Real Time Scheduling of Nonidentical Multiple Batch Processors with Machine Eligibility Restriction

This study addresses a new problem on scheduling of nonidentical multiple diffusion furnaces (NMDF) with machine eligibility restriction (MER) along with important real-life problem characteristics such as multiple and incompatible job-families, different release time, different due-date, non-agreeable release time & due-date, and occurrences of randomly and dynamically generated real time events (jobs and/or resources related) to minimize total weighted tardiness. Due to the computational difficulty in obtaining an optimal solution for large real-life sized scheduling of NMDF, an alternate solution procedure: heuristic algorithm based on due-date based dispatching rule, called due-date based heuristic algorithm (DDHA) is constructed in this study. Though there has been extensive scheduling research relating to the use of existing dispatching rules in semiconductor manufacturing along with/without new dispatching rules, there is no comparative analysis of all due-date based dispatching rules for real time scheduling (RTS) of NMDF-MER. Hence, this study proposes 20 variants of DDHA, considering various due-date based dispatching rules, for RTS-NMDF-MER and compares their performance. A suitable experimental design is developed and randomly generated 270 instances to represent the research problem considered in this study. From the empirical and statistical analysis carried out in this study, the better performing DDHA(s), for RTS-NMDF-MER, are identified.

SORTING APPROACHES IN THE HEURISTIC BASED ON REMAINING AVAILABLE AND PROCESSING PERIODS TO MINIMIZE TOTAL WEIGHTED TARDINESS IN PROGRESSIVE IDLING-FREE 1-MACHINE PREEMPTIVE SCHEDULING

Background. In preemptive job scheduling, total weighted tardiness minimization is commonly reduced to solving a combinatorial problem, which becomes practically intractable as the number of jobs and the numbers of their processing periods increase. To cope with this challenge, heuristics are used. A heuristic, in which the decisive ratio is the weighted reciprocal of the maximum of a pair of the remaining processing period and remaining available period, is closely the best one. However, the heuristic may produce schedules of a few jobs whose total weighted tardiness is enormously huge compared to the real minimum. Therefore, this heuristic needs further improvements, one of which already exists for jobs without priority weights with a sorting approach where remaining processing periods are minimized. Three other sorting approaches still can outperform it, but such exceptions are quite rare. Objective. The goal is to determine the influence of the four sorting approaches and try to select the best one in the case where jobs have their priority weights. The heuristic will be applied to tight-tardy progressive idling-free 1-machine preemptive scheduling, where the release dates are given in ascending order starting from 1 to the number of jobs, and the due dates are tightly set after the release dates. Methods. To achieve the said goal, a computational study is carried out with applying each of the four heuristic approaches to minimize total weighted tardiness. For this, two series of 4151500 scheduling problems are generated. In the solution of a scheduling problem, a sorting approach can “win” solely or “win” in a group of approaches, producing the heuristically minimal total weighted tardiness. In each series, the distributions of sole-and-group “wins” are ascertained. Results. The sole “wins” and non-whole-group “wins” are rare: the four sorting approaches produce schedules with the same total weighted tardiness in over 98.39 % of scheduling problems. Although the influence of these approaches is different, it is therefore not really significant. Each of the sorting approaches has heavy disadvantages leading sometimes to gigantic inaccuracies, although they occur rarely. When the inaccuracy occurs to be more than 30 %, this implies that 3 to 9 jobs are scheduled. Conclusions. Unlike the case when jobs do not have their priority weights, it is impossible to select the best sorting approach for the case with job priority weights. Instead, a hyper-heuristic comprising the sorting approaches (i. e., the whole group, where each sorting is applied) may be constructed. If a parallelization can be used to process two or even four sorting routines simultaneously, the computation time will not be significantly affected.

Infinity Substitute in Finding Exact Minimum of Total Weighted Tardiness in Tight-Tardy Progressive 1-machine Scheduling by Idling-free Preemptions

A job schedule ensuring the exact minimum of total weighted tardiness can be found with the respective integer linear programming problem model, in which the infinity showing that the respective states are either forbidden or impossible is substituted with a sufficiently great positive integer. An open question is whether the substitute can be selected so that the computation time would be decreased. Thus, it is ascertained that, whichever job lengths and its priority weights are, substituting the infinity with just “a sufficiently great positive integer” is never recommended. To decrease the computation time on average, it is strongly recommended to select the infinity substitute as multiple maximum over finite decision variable weights in the exact model. It is sufficient to take 2 to 5 such maxima as the infinity substitute. However, the shortened computation time is not guaranteed for solving a single or few scheduling problems. It is only an expected benefit, which builds up as a few hundred scheduling problems are solved at least.

A Time–Cost Tradeoff Problem with Multiple Assessments and Release Times on a Chain Precedence Graph

We consider two variants of a time–cost tradeoff problem with multiple assessments on a chain precedence graph. Furthermore, each job can only be started after a release time, and a penalty cost is incurred when a job is not finished before its due date. The motivation is from the project such that a project owner can control the duration of each job and the support level of each project partner to avoid the penalty cost from the tardy jobs. We describe the penalty costs of the first and the second variants as the total weighted number of tardy jobs and the total weighted tardiness, respectively. These can be avoided by compressing the processing times or advancing the release times, which incurs a compression cost or release cost according to the linear and the piecewise constant functions, respectively. The objective is to minimize the total penalty, compression cost and release cost. In this paper, we propose the procedure based on the reduction to a shortest path problem, and show that the procedure can solve two variants in strongly polynomial time.

Parallel Algorithm with Blocks for a Single-Machine Total Weighted Tardiness Scheduling Problem

In this paper, the weighted tardiness single-machine scheduling problem is considered. To solve it an approximate (tabu search) algorithm, which works by improving the current solution by searching the neighborhood, is used. Methods of eliminating bad solutions from the neighborhood (the so-called block elimination properties) were also presented and implemented in the algorithm. Blocks allow a significant shortening of the process of searching the neighborhood generated by insert type moves. The designed parallel tabu search algorithm was implemented using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) library. The obtained speedups are very large (over 60,000×) and superlinear. This may be a sign that the parallel algorithm is superior to the sequential one as the sequential algorithm is not able to effectively search the solution space for the problem under consideration. Only the introduction of diversification process through parallelization can provide an adequate coverage of the entire search process. The current methods of parallelization of metaheuristics give a speedup which strongly depends on the problem’s instances, rarely greater than number of used parallel processors. The method proposed here allows the obtaining of huge speedup values (over 60,000×), but only when so-called blocks are used. The above-mentioned speedup values can be obtained on high performance computing infrastructures such as clusters with the use of MPI library.