Heuristic control of multiple batch processors with incompatible job families and future job arrivals

We analyse the problem of minimising the mean cycle time of a batch processing stage containing K > 1 batch processors in parallel with incompatible job families and future job arrivals. We provide an integer linear programming formulation and a dynamic program formulation for small problem instances. For larger problem instances, we propose an online heuristic policy MPC_REPEAT. At each instance a decision has to be made, MPC_REPEAT decomposes the problem of simultaneously assigning multiple batches to multiple processors into sequentially assigning multiple batches to multiple processors. When job families are uncorrelated, we show via simulation experiments that MPC_REPEAT has significantly lower mean cycle time than a previously proposed look-ahead method except when: (MPC_REPEAT ignores some job families AND the traffic intensity is high.) Our experiments also reveal that increasing the job family correlation of consecutive job arrivals results, with a few exceptions, in a mean cycle-time reduction, ...