Unrelated parallel machine scheduling with secondary resource constraints

This paper considers unrelated parallel machine scheduling with secondary resource constraints. There are n jobs, each needing to be processed on one of the fitted machines. A setup that includes detaching one die and attaching another from the fitted die type is incurred if the type of job scheduled is different from the last job on that machine. For each kind of die type, the number of dies available is limited. Due to the mechanical structure of the machines, the processing time of a job depends on the machine on which the job is processed, and some jobs are restricted to be processed only on certain machines. In this paper, a heuristic with a capability relative to a runtime and solution quality is developed to minimise the makespan. The performance of the presented heuristic is evaluated through extensive computational experiments. Computational results show that the presented heuristic outperforms the search method tested. It is expected that this research can be applied in industry where unrelated parallel machines are used to process different components and setups for auxiliary equipments are required.