A fast branch-and-bound algorithm with an improved lower bound for solving the multiprocessor scheduling problem

This paper proposes a fast branch-and-bound algorithm for solving the multiprocessor scheduling problem. The key point of our method is the proposal of an efficient quadratic algorithm for calculating the Fernandez and Bussell's (1973) lower bound. In the following, we discuss about the trade-off between the cost for calculating a lower bound and the size of pruned subtrees. Several experiments are conducted to evaluate the goodness of the proposed method.