Scheduling uniform parallel machines with machine eligibility restrictions to minimize total weighted tardiness

This paper considers the problem of scheduling uniform parallel machines with machine eligibility restrictions to minimize total weighted tardiness. We presented a new heuristic algorithm based local search on each machine for this problem. The experimental results have shown that the proposed heuristic was a very effective method for this problem in terms of solution quality, computational expense, coding complexity and algorithm stability, as seen through a comparison of 6 algorithms on various pairs of test data. Moreover, we observed that the proposed algorithm can be extended to the unrelated parallel machine setting.