Customer Order Scheduling Problems with Fixed Machine-Job Assignment

This paper considers a variation of customer order scheduling problems. The variation is the case where machine-job assignment is fixed, and the objective is to minimize the sum of the completion times of the batches. In customer order scheduling problems, jobs are dispatched in batches. While a machine can process only one job at a time, multiple machines can simultaneously process jobs in a batch. We first establish a couple of lower bounds. Then, we develop a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm that runs in exponential time on the number of batches when there exist two machines. For the same problem with arbitrary number of machines, we present two simple heuristics, which use simple scheduling rules such as shortest batch first and shortest makespan batch first rules. Finally, we empirically evaluate the heuristics.