Makespan Minimization for Scheduling Unrelated Parallel Machine with Sequence-Dependent Setup Time

This chapter presents an investigation of a scheduling problem of unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup time from hard disk drive industries. It specifically focuses on the testing process and setup changes of the testing program according to the product type required. When the demand of customers is greater, the setup of the testing program increases, causing a reduction in production efficiency. The objective is to sequence and allocate the jobs for the unrelated parallel machines to minimize the makespan. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, and a heuristics algorithm is developed to find near-optimal solution. The results from the heuristics are compared with the optimal solutions to evaluate the effectiveness of the heuristics algorithm.