Optimisation algorithms for parallel machine scheduling problems with setup times

Parallel machine scheduling is a problem of high practical relevance for the manufacturing industry. In this paper, we address a variant in which an unweighted combination of earliness, tardiness and setup times aggregated in a single objective function is minimised. We compare an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) approach with a variant of local search implementing a probabilistic Best Response Dynamic algorithm (p-BRD) inspired by game theoretic considerations. Our p-BRD algorithm achieved promising results outperforming the EA on a series of test sets.