Scheduling rules to minimize total tardiness in a parallel machine problem with setup and calendar constraints

TL;DR

This paper addresses the scheduling of parallel machines with setup and calendar constraints in pharmaceutical quality control, proposing new rules and a simulated annealing approach to minimize total tardiness.

Contribution

It introduces novel scheduling rules and a simulated annealing method specifically designed for parallel machines with setup and calendar constraints to reduce total tardiness.

Findings

New scheduling rules improve tardiness minimization.

Simulated annealing outperforms previous heuristics.

Effective in pharmaceutical laboratory settings.

Abstract

Quality control lead times are one of most significant causes of loss of time in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. This is partly due to the organization of laboratories that feature parallel multipurpose machines for chromatographic analyses. The testing process requires long setup times and operators are needed to launch the process. The various controls are non-preemptive and are characterized by a release date, a due date and available routings. These quality processes lead to significant delays, and we therefore evaluate the total tardiness criterion. Previous heuristics were defined for the total tardiness criterion, parallel machines, and setup such as ATC (Apparent Tardiness Cost) and ATCS (ATC with setups). We propose new rules and a simulated annealing procedure in order to minimize total tardiness.