Scheduling splittable tasks on multi-purpose parallel machines with release dates and deadlines

In industrial production, a changeover or a setup is a very complex operation to consider and the probability that something breaks on the production line immediately after a changeover is raised significantly. A number of studies about scheduling problems that take into consideration setup times have been presented recently. The problem presented in this paper consist in minimizing the number of setup considering that the jobs scheduled on several machines can be splitted. Firstly, we use a heuristic to find an initial feasible solution and then we apply a neighbourhood search to improve the initial solution. Solutions are represented as sets of assignments and sequences, execution times are then determined using a maximum flow algorithm.