An efficient heuristic for minimizing maximum lateness on parallel batch machines

Batch machines are common in many complex manufacturing systems like wafer fabrication facilities. They are characterized by multiple capacity and long processing times, and thus scheduling of them is important for raising the performance of the entire system. In this paper, we address the identical parallel batch machine scheduling problem considering incompatible job families and dynamic job arrivals. A local search-based heuristic is proposed to minimize maximum lateness. Performance of the proposed heuristic is compared with a state-of-the-art genetic algorithm-based approach, and the experimental results show that our approach is better than the benchmark approach in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency.