An Improved Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for Scheduling Jobs on Identical Machines

In an earlier paper ('Scheduling Jobs on a Number of Identical Machines' by Elmaghraby and Park, March 1974, AIIE Transactions) a branch-and-bound algorithm was developed for the sequencing problem when all jobs are available to process at time zero and are independet (i.e., there are not a priori precedence relationships among jobs.). However, the amount of computation required by the algorithm was not considered to be short if more than 50 jobs were processed. As an effort to improve the algorithm, the present paper modifies the implicit enumeration procedure in the algorithm so that moderately large problems can be treated with what appears to be a short computational time. Mainly this paper is concerned with improving the lower bound in the implicit enumeration procedure. The computational experiences with this new branch-and-bound algorithm are given.