Guided genetic algorithm for solving unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with additional resources

Abstract

This paper solved the unrelated parallel machine scheduling with additional resources (UPMR) problem. The processing time and the number of required resources for each job rely on the machine that does the processing. Each job j needed units of resources (rjm) during its time of processing on a machine m. These additional resources are limited, and this made the UPMR a difficult problem to solve. In this study, the maximum completion time of jobs makespan must be minimized. Here, we proposed genetic algorithm to solve the UPMR problem because of the robustness and the success of genetic algorithm in solving many optimization problems. An enhancement of GA (GGA) was also proposed in this work. Generally, the experiment involves tuning the parameters of GA. Additionally, an appropriate selection of GA operators was also experimented. The GGA is not used to solve the unspecified dynamic UPMR. Besides, the utilization of parameters tuning and operators gave a balance between exploration and exploitation and thus help the search escape the local optimum. Results show that the GGA outperforms the SGA, but it still didn't match the results in the literature. On the other hand, GGA significantly outperforms all methods in terms of CPU time.